Clickbank

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.

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.

If the PDF that you are distributing to your audience is one that you want them to spend some time reading and digesting, adding bookmarks will improve the chances of this happening. However, 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.

To create a bookmark, go into Acrobat Standard or Professional and open your PDF file. If the Bookmarks panel is not visible, choose View – Navigation Panels – Bookmarks then find the page you want to link to. With the page active, go to the menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel labeled Options and choose New Bookmark. Type in the name of the new bookmark and just keep repeating these actions until you have all the bookmarks you need.

If this all sounds a bit tedious then let’s look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, instead of typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to highlight some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the highlighted text will be used as the name of the bookmark. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark: Control-B.

It is also possible to use software which will create bookmarks automatically like AutoBookmark. This utility scans a document and examines its structure recognising headings by the font sizes, alignment and indentation levels. It then automatically generates a hierarchy of bookmarks to pages where headings are found.

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.

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.

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that Adobe InDesign has a similar utility which creates bookmarks automatically. However, this time, the PDF feature is inherent in the program, so you don’t need to buy a full version of Acrobat. Two other DTP packages also offer an equivalent PDF creation facility: InDesign’s big rival QuarkXPress and the little-known but brilliant Serif PagePlus.

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.

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.

Wouldn’t it be a total waste of time if you spend a couple of hours creating tons of useful bookmarks only for your audience to completely ignore them either because they don’t know what bookmarks are or because their Bookmarks panel is closed and it never occurs to them to open it.

Before distributing your PDF file, choose Properties from the File menu and click on the “Initial View” tab. Next, from the “Navigation Panels” drop-down, choose “Bookmarks Panel and Page”. This will ensure that, when the user opens your document, their bookmarks panel will also open.

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent computer training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses in central London and all over England.