Using Bookmarks To Make Your PDF Documents More Interactive

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.

If the PDF that you are distributing to your audience is one that you want them to spend some time reading and digesting, adding bookmarks will improve the chances of this happening. However, bookmarks cannot be created with Acrobat Reader: you will need either Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the commercial versions of Acrobat. But then you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF in the first place.

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.

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.

Then there is Adobe's own PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003 which is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional producing an extra menu in Office programs called "Adobe PDF" and an "Adobe PDFMaker" 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.

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that Adobe InDesign has a similar utility which creates bookmarks automatically. However, this time, the PDF feature is inherent in the program, so you don't need to buy a full version of Acrobat. Two other DTP packages also offer an equivalent PDF creation facility: InDesign's big rival QuarkXPress and the little-known but brilliant Serif PagePlus.

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.

Wouldn't it be a total waste of time if you spend a couple of hours creating tons of useful bookmarks only for your audience to completely ignore them either because they don't know what bookmarks are or because their Bookmarks panel is closed and it never occurs to them to open it.

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.

Article Source: http://www.article-heaven.com

The writer of this article runs training courses with Macresource Computer Solutions, a top quality computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses in central London and all over England.

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