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.
Once you have created a PDF, spending a few minutes making it more interactive will increase its usefulness to anyone who opens it. Bookmarks are a simple way of creating this interactivily and increasing your chances of your PDF influencing potential customers.
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'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.)
Still too tedious? How about using a program that creates all your bookmarks for your automatically? AutoBookmark is a commercial utility that just does that. It looks at the headings and text formats used throughout the documents and then creates bookmarks based on the document structure.
If you have Microsoft Office and any full version of Acrobat, you may have noticed a nice little utility for creating PDFs. It adds a toolbar and menu to each Office program on your machine.
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.
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.
It is also worth mentioning that bookmarks can do more than just link to a particular page within the PDF document. Firstly, by default, they actually link to a view rather than a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your document contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and then create a bookmark. When your users click this bookmark, they will be taken to the exact zoom level that was current when the bookmark was created.
And what about all the other stuff you can get bookmarks to do? Well, the first thing will be to remove the default action. Right-click the bookmark and then activate the Actions tab. Next, select the "Go to a page in this document" action that was created by default and click on the Delete button. Select a different action from the drop-down at the top of the screen and then click Add.
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.
So, they created a nice setting which allows you to specify which panels are open when the user first opens the file. To access this feature, just choose File - Properties then click on the tab marked Initial View. Set the Navigation Panels drop-down to "Bookmarks Panel and Page". That way the Bookmarks will be opened whenever your document loads.
The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent computer training company offering Training courses on Adobe Acrobat at their training centre in London and throughout the UK.
