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 Let Bookmarks Enhance The Interactivity Of Your PDF documents |
| PDFs are documents whose original format and layout has been preserved, allowing users to view the document as it was originally formatted without the need to own the program in which it was created. All you need is the freely available Acrobat Reader and you can open the document and browse through it pretty much as its creator intended.
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.
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.
First, open the PDF using Acrobat Standard or Professional. Next, open the Bookmarks panel and scroll up or down to the page that the bookmark is going to take the user to. Click on the Options menu located in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and choose New Bookmark. Enter a descriptive name for the bookmark then do it all over again to create more bookmarks.
You're probably thinking that this all sounds a bit tedious. The good news is that there are a few ways of accelerating the process. The first technique involves using the selection tool which you will find next to the Hand tool on the Acrobat toolbar. Once you have scrolled to the page you want linked, highlight some text on the page which could act as the name of the bookmark. When you create your bookmark, this text will automatically become the name of the bookmark. (Also, to create the bookmark, try using Control-B.)
Better still, why not have your bookmarks automatically generated for you! The software utility AutoBookmark will generate bookmarks automatically based on the textual attributes of your PDF file such as font size and indentation.
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.
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.
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.
The author runs training courses with Macresource Computer Solutions, a top quality computer training company offering Training courses on Adobe Acrobat at their training centre in London and all over England. Don't reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
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