How Adding Bookmarks Can Improve the Interactivity of your PDFs

The great thing about PDF documents is that they look exactly like the original document from which they were created but people don't need to buy the software to view them. They just need to download Acrobat Reader, a free utility, from Adobe's web site.

Almost everyone agrees that PDFs are a great thing but they can sometimes be rather difficult and tedious to navigate. That's where bookmarks come in handy: they are clickable headings which link to specific parts of the PDF document and enable you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or moving one page at a time.

If you have taken the trouble to make a PDF file available to your audience, chances are you will want them to actually read it and find it useful and informative. If your PDF contains bookmarks this is more likely to happen.

The bookmarks panel is standard feature of all versions of Acrobat including the free reader. To make it visible, the user clicks on the View menu, then on Navigation Panels then on Bookmarks. To use a bookmark, the user just clicks on it and is taken to the page with which the bookmark has been associated.

Bookmarks a must-have accessory for any PDF file that wants to call itself interactive. The bad news is, you can't create them with Acrobat Reader but, in any case, you can't create PDF files with Reader either. For both of these activities you need to purchase of the two commercial Acrobat products: Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional.

To create a bookmark, go into Acrobat Standard or Professional and open your PDF file. If the Bookmarks panel is not visible, choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks then find the page you want to link to. With the page active, go to the menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel labeled Options and choose New Bookmark. Type in the name of the new bookmark and just keep repeating these actions until you have all the bookmarks you need.

If this all sounds a bit tedious then let's look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, instead of typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to highlight some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the highlighted text will be used as the name of the bookmark. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark: Control-B.

It is also possible to use software which will create bookmarks automatically like AutoBookmark. This utility scans a document and examines its structure recognising headings by the font sizes, alignment and indentation levels. It then automatically generates a hierarchy of bookmarks to pages where headings are found.

Adobe themselves also produce a macro utility called PDFMaker which gets added to any installed Microsoft Office program whenever you load Acrobat Standard or Professional onto a machine. The utility is accessed via a menu and an office toolbar.

When you create a PDF using the PDFMaker utility, any text formatted with Word's heading styles ("Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc.) will automatically be converted to PDF bookmarks as will entries in indexes and tables of content. Similarly, if you PDF an Excel workbook using PDFMaker, bookmarks to each worksheet will automatically be created. In PowerPoint, bookmarks to each slide in your presentation will be generated for you.

Then there are three page layout programs which have similar features: QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. Firstly, these are examples of programs which produce PDFs without the need of a full version of Acrobat. Secondly, like Word, they will all generate PDFs containing bookmarks based on indexes, styles and tables of content.

Bookmarks don't just take the user to a given page: they can do lots of other things as well. The first point we should make is, that strictly speaking bookmarks take the user to a view rather than to a page. Say, for example, you wanted to link to a close-up of a photo somewhere on a particular page, you just zoom in on the photo and then create your bookmark. That way, when the user clicks on the bookmark, they get taken not just to that page but also to the exact same zoom level.

If you want your bookmark to do something other than link to a view, first you must remove the default action. Right-clicking on a bookmark will display a pop-up menu from which you need to choose Properties. There are two tabs: General and Actions. Click on Actions, delete the default action by highlighting it and clicking on Delete then replace it with any of the ones in the Select Action drop-down menu.

Finally, having spent some time preparing bookmarks to make life easier for your audience, wouldn't it be a shame if they don't actually see them because their bookmarks panel is not open! Luckily, Adobe have thought of this.

As part of the finalization process after creating your bookmarks, choose File - Properties then click on the Initial View tab. Set the initial view to Bookmarks panel and Page to ensure that bookmarks will always show when people open your document.

Article Source: http://www.dummiesguideto.com

The author runs training courses with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent IT training company offering Training courses on Adobe Acrobat in central London and all over England.

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