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Using Bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat
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When we run classes on Adobe Acrobat at our London training centre, one of the first things we cover is the use of bookmarks. Most people agree that PDFs are brilliant but they can sometimes be rather difficult and tedious to navigate. Enter bookmark: they are clickable headings which link to specific parts of the PDF document and allow you to move around a lot more quickly 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 bookmarks panel is one of the navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click on the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. Click on a bookmark to move to the page that it links to.
Bookmarks cannot be created using Acrobat Reader: you will need Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the versions of Acrobat you have to pay for. But, for the most part, you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF as well.
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 like hard work, let's look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, as an alternative to typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to select some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the selected text will be used as the bookmark name. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark which is Control-B.
You can also generate bookmarks automatically. For example, there is Adobe PDFMaker. This handy utility is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates an extra menu in all Microsoft Office programs called "Adobe PDF". It also creates an "Adobe PDFMaker" toolbar.
When you use the PDFMaker utility to create a PDF, any text formatted with a Word heading style, such as "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc., will be automatically converted to Acrobat bookmarks. The same applies to tables of content and index entries. Similarly, if you use PDFMaker to convert an Excel workbook to PDF, bookmarks to each worksheet will automatically be generated. Even in PowerPoint, a bookmark to each slide in your presentation will be created 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.
Don't be fooled into thinking that bookmarks only be used to link to a particular page within the PDF document. (They can do tons of other things as well.) In any case, they actually link to a view not a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your PDF file contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and create a bookmark of that view. When your user clicks the bookmark, he or she will be taken to the zoom level that was current when you created the bookmark.
About the Author
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses in London and throughout the UK.
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