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Acrobat Training Should Always Include Bookmarks

07.25.2008 · Posted in Home and Garden Articles

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.rnrnWhen 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.rnrnThe 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.rnrnBookmarks 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.rnrnTo 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.rnrnCreating 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.rnrnIt is also possible to generate bookmarks automatically. For example, PDFMaker, a utility for Microsoft Office 97, 2002 and 2003 which is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional producing an extra menu in Office programs called “Adobe PDF” and an “Adobe PDFMaker” toolbar.rnrnWhen you create a PDF using the Acrobat PDFMaker, any paragraphs formatted with a Word heading style, e.g., “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, etc., will automatically create PDF bookmarks as do all entries in tables of content and indexes. In the same way, if you PDF an Excel workbook with the PDFMaker, bookmarks to each sheet will be automatically generated. In PowerPoint, too, bookmarks to every slide in the presentation will be automatically generated.rnrnSome 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.rnrnIt 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.

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