Acrobat Training Should Always Include Bookmarks
When we run courses on Adobe Acrobat in London, one of the first topics we cover is the use of bookmarks. 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 containing key information about your services or products, you want to make sure that your readers can find important facts as quickly as possible. Including bookmarks in your PDF files can make them more attractive and useful to potential customers.
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 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.
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.
Some programs can also generate bookmarks automatically. One example is Adobe PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003. This is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates a new menu in Office programs called "Adobe PDF" and also 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.
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.
When you distribute PDFs containing key information about your services or products, you want to make sure that your readers can find important facts as quickly as possible. Including bookmarks in your PDF files can make them more attractive and useful to potential customers.
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 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.
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.
Some programs can also generate bookmarks automatically. One example is Adobe PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003. This is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates a new menu in Office programs called "Adobe PDF" and also 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.
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:
Author is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses at their central London training centre.
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