When we run Adobe Acrobat training courses in London, one of the first topics we tackle is bookmarks. Almost everyone will agree that PDFs are a great invention but it can sometimes be rather tedious to navigate through them. That’s where bookmarks become useful: they are clickable headings which take you to a specific part of the PDF document and allow you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or paging.

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 Acrobat’s many navigation panels. It is normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click the bookmark icon or choose View – Navigation Panels – Bookmarks. When you click on a bookmark, you are taken to the page that it is linked to.

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.

Once you have created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Next, navigate to the first page that you want your audience to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you think useful.

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.

It 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.

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.

The major DTP packages will also automatically create PDF bookmarks based on styles, indexes and tables of content), in much the same way as Word. This applies to QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. If you own one of these three software applications, you don’t actually need to have a copy of Acrobat to create your PDF files, since this capability is built-in to each of these brilliant programs.

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.

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