"All About Bookmarks"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 11 for 2006

Previously, I have touched on the importance of PDF bookmarking for ensuring that your documents are user-friendly and easy to navigate. Bookmarking enables readers to find what they are looking for in a document as fast as possible, without having to skim through page after page. Most PDF viewers (such as Adobe Reader and Nitro PDF Professional) include a bookmarks tree which acts as a table of contents.

Bookmarks can be created manually but, if you're creating more than a few, it is often more efficient to carry out the task automatically. There are several third-party tools available that can be set up to automatically identify certain headings, text colours and sizes in a PDF document as desired bookmark positions. Bluebeam Pushbutton Plus is one such tool.

I am often asked to assist users who are faced with having to split a large PDF document into smaller sections. The issue is that they stand to lose all their bookmarks – will they need to recreate each and every bookmark once the splitting has been done? Fortunately, the answer is no.

Technically, it is not correct to say that internal links will be retained once a document is split into parts. However, some third-party tools can preserve bookmarks such that they will function as before, so long as the separated files are kept in the same folder. ARTS PDF Aerialist can do this on the desktop, while ARTS PDF Split Pro will enable you to do it on a server.

There are other bookmarking tools and a host of PDF manipulation products available at PDF Store - just visit the Edit/Prepare aisle.