View PDF | Print View | Html Version
by: LynneKramer
Total views: 2
Word Count: 619

When we run Adobe Acrobat training courses in London, one of the first topics we tackle is bookmarks. Almost everyone will agree that PDFs are a great invention but it can sometimes be rather tedious to navigate through them. That's where bookmarks become useful: they are clickable headings which take you to a specific part of the PDF document and allow you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or paging.

If you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to ensure that your audience can access key facts as quickly as possible. Adding a few bookmarks to your PDF files can add value to them by making them more attractive to potential clients.

The bookmarks panel is one of Acrobat's many navigation panels. It is normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. When you click on a bookmark, you are taken to the page that it is linked 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.

To create bookmarks, open the PDF with Acrobat Standard or Professional and make the Bookmarks panel visible. Next, move to the first page that you want to link to, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel then enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this same procedure to create all your bookmarks.

Creating bookmarks can be bit tedious. However, there are a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, you don't have to type a name for each bookmark. You can highlight some text on the page then choose New Bookmark. Acrobat uses the highlighted text as the name of the bookmark. Another thing you can do is to use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark. This, as you can probably guess, 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.

There are also DTP packages which will automatically generate PDF bookmarks in the same way as Microsoft Word (from styles, indexes and tables of content). Naturally InDesign will do this but also QuarkXPress and Serif PagePlus. These three software packages have the additional benefit that you don't actually need to own Acrobat Standard or Professional. The facility to create PDFs is built-in to each of these packages.

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.

About the Author

The The writer of this article is a training consultant with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses in London and throughout the UK.

Add Comment