Acrobat Training Should Always Include Bookmarks
Posted by: Lynne Kramer in Computers, tags: ComputersWhen 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 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 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.
Having created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Then navigate to the first page that you want your readers to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu located in the top right of the Bookmarks panel. Finally, enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you want.
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.
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 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.
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.
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