"Navigation features"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 5 for 2006

It is widely recognized that the beauty of PDF is that it is portable – anybody can view it in any type of operating environment. Preserving the look and feel of your document means that it can be read by the widest possible audience. Take this a step further and make your document as simple to navigate as possible. There’s a wide variety of navigation features that you can take advantage of and your readers will thank you for it.

Indexing can be invaluable when dealing with large documents or whole document collections comprised of legal briefs, e-books, white papers and more. Adobe Acrobat gives you the ability to create a searchable text index via the ‘Catalog’ feature. For a fully featured indexing plug-in, check out PDF Index Creator. Large documents also benefit from being broken up with bookmarks, usually where significant headings and sections appear. There are a variety of products available that can generate bookmarks based on heading styles and formatting, products that can automatically create them based on the criteria you set. Jaws PDF Editor includes a range of bookmark manipulation options and ARTS PDF Aerialist allows you to create bookmarks as a batch process.

A navigation feature can really be anything that simplifies how a user moves around on-screen; it can be as simple as a table of contents (TOC), which all large documents should have. A key feature of ARTS PDF Aerialist Professional is the advanced TOC generation, which can automatically build links to your pages using bookmarks, heading styles and more.

For even more tools to assist you with navigation features, visit the Edit & Prepare PDF section at PDF Store.