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Adobe Acrobat Interactivity: Using Bookmarks

By: Bethany Wilson.

A PDF file is a document which retains all of the visual attributes of the file from which it was generated. This means that users will see the file as its creator formatted it but that they don't need the software that was used to make the document. The only software they will need is Acrobat Reader which, as everyone knows, is free.
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 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.
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.
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.
First, open the PDF using Acrobat Standard or Professional. Next, open the Bookmarks panel and scroll up or down to the page that the bookmark is going to take the user to. Click on the Options menu located in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and choose New Bookmark. Enter a descriptive name for the bookmark then do it all over again to create more bookmarks.
You may be thinking that this sounds about as much fun as watching paint dry, so we'd better have a look at speeding things up for you. Well, one thing you can do is to have Acrobat create the name of a new bookmark automatically. To do this, before using the New Bookmark command, just highlight some text on the page you are linking to. (The selection tool is next the Hand tool on Acrobat reader.) Acrobat will use the selected text as the bookmark name.
Still too tedious? How about using a program that creates all your bookmarks for your automatically? AutoBookmark is a commercial utility that just does that. It looks at the headings and text formats used throughout the documents and then creates bookmarks based on the document structure.
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.
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.
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.
Bookmarks are a lot more flexible than people realize: they do much more than simply taking the user to a particular page. Also, its not actually a link to a page that bookmarks link to, it's the view of that page that was current when the bookmark is created. Thus, for example, if you create a bookmark after zooming in on a particular item on the page, that bookmark will take the user back to that same zoom whenever it is clicked.
In addition, bookmarks can be made to perform other tasks, such as linking to a web URL or opening a document (in any format) on an intranet. To change what a bookmark will do, having created it, right-click the bookmark and choose Properties, then click on the Actions tab. Highlight the default action ("Go to a page in this document") and click Delete. Choose an alternative action from the drop-down menu labeled "Select Action" and click the Add button.
Finally, having spent some time preparing bookmarks to make life easier for your audience, wouldn't it be a shame if they don't actually see them because their bookmarks panel is not open! Luckily, Adobe have thought of this.
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.

Article Source: http://www.articlefinder.org

The writer of this article 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.

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