Using Bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat

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.


If you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to ensure that your audience can access key facts as quickly as possible. Adding a few bookmarks to your PDF files can add value to them by making them more attractive to potential clients.

The bookmarks panel is one of Acrobat's navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To make bookmarks visible, click on the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. Clicking on a bookmark will move you to the page that it links to.

Acrobat Reader cannot be used to create PDFs: you will need either Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, the commercial versions of Acrobat. But then you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF anyway.

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 like hard work, let's look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, as an alternative to typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to select some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the selected text will be used as the bookmark name. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark which 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 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.

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.