When 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 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.

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.

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.

You can also generate bookmarks automatically. For example, there is Adobe PDFMaker. This handy utility is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates an extra menu in all Microsoft Office programs called "Adobe PDF". It also creates 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.

PDF bookmarks can do a lot more than just link to a particular page within the PDF document. For example, they can link to web pages. By default, they actually link not to a page but, rather, to a view. Let's say, for example, that your document contains a map. You can zoom in on the map until it fills the screen and then add your bookmark. When users click the bookmark, they will go to the exact zoom level that was in place when you created your bookmark.