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Using Bookmarks To Make Your PDF Documents More Interactive
A PDF file is a document which retains all of the visual attributes of the file from which it was generated. This means that users will see the file as its creator formatted it but that they don't need the software that was used to make the document. The only software they will need is Acrobat Reader which, as everyone knows, is free.
A PDF file is a document which retains all of the visual attributes of the file from which it was generated. This means that users will see the file as its creator formatted it but that they don’t need the software that was used to make the document. The only software they will need is Acrobat Reader which, as everyone knows, is free.
PDFs are a great thing but it is often difficult to find a particular piece of information just by scrolling through the document. Bookmarks make navigation less painful by allowing the user to get to a specific place in the document by just clicking a link.
When you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to make sure that your audience can get to key facts as quickly as possible. Adding bookmarks to your PDF files can make them more useful and attractive to potential clients.
The first thing you need to do is to identify the bookmarks panel. It is one of the windows usually found on the left of the Acrobat Reader layout. If it is not visible, just go to the View menu, choose Navigation Panels and then Bookmarks. To activate a particular bookmark, you just click on its name.
Hopefully, you will agree that bookmarks are worth created. Howver, they cannot be created with the free Reader version of Adobe Acrobat: you need to buy either Adobe Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, the two non-free versions of Acrobat. Having said that, you also need these packages to be able to produce your PDF files anyway.
Once you have created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Next, navigate to the first page that you want your audience to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you think useful.
You may be thinking that this sounds about as much fun as watching paint dry, so we’d better have a look at speeding things up for you. Well, one thing you can do is to have Acrobat create the name of a new bookmark automatically. To do this, before using the New Bookmark command, just highlight some text on the page you are linking to. (The selection tool is next the Hand tool on Acrobat reader.) Acrobat will use the selected text as the bookmark name.
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.
Let’s look at what PDFMaker does in the three most widely-used programs of the Microsoft Office suite. Firstly, in Word, it generates bookmarks out of any index entries, table of contents items and stylesheet-formatted text. Secondly, in PowerPoint, it creates bookmarks which take you to each of your slides and, thirdly, in Excel, bookmarks are generated that are linked to each of the worksheets of the original Excel workbook.
Some DTP packages will also automatically generate PDF bookmarks in a similar way to Microsoft Word (based on styles, indexes and tables of content), namely InDesign, QuarkXPress and Serif PagePlus. These three software applications have the added benefit that you don’t actually need to buy Acrobat Standard or Professional to create your PDF files, since this facility is built-in to each of these great programs.
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.
Before distributing your PDF file, choose Properties from the File menu and click on the “Initial View” tab. Next, from the “Navigation Panels” drop-down, choose “Bookmarks Panel and Page”. This will ensure that, when the user opens your document, their bookmarks panel will also open.