Working with Bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat 9

Date: Oct 17, 2008 By Adobe Creative Team. Article is provided courtesy of Adobe Press.
Getting around in a huge PDF document can take a lot of time. The Adobe Creative Team shows how to speed things up by using the bookmark feature in Acrobat 9 to create and organize bookmarks that give you quick-click access to the page you want.

A bookmark in Adobe Acrobat 9 is simply a link represented by text in the Bookmarks panel. Bookmarks that are created automatically by many authoring programs are generally linked to headings in the text or to figure captions, but you can also add your own bookmarks in Acrobat to create a custom outline of a document or to open other documents.

Additionally, you can use electronic bookmarks as you would paper bookmarks—to mark a place in a document that you want to highlight, or to which you want to return later.

NOTE

This article is adapted from Adobe Acrobat 9 Classroom in a Book. Copyright 2009. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press.

Adding a Bookmark

For this example, we'll add a bookmark for the front cover of a presentation. (If you don't have the example files from the book, you can use one of your own PDF documents that contains multiple pages.)

  1. Click the First Page button on the toolbar (see Figure 1) to display the first page of the document. For this example, the first page is the front cover of the presentation. Make sure that the Single Page button on the toolbar is selected; a bookmark always displays a page at the magnification that was used when the bookmark was created.
    Figure 1

    Figure 1

  2. In the Bookmarks panel, click the New Bookmark icon. A new, untitled bookmark is added below whatever bookmark was selected or at the bottom of the list of bookmarks (see Figure 2).
    Figure 2

    Figure 2

  3. In the text box of the new bookmark, type the bookmark label that you want. We typed Title Page for this example. Click anywhere in the Bookmarks panel to move the focus from the text box to the bookmark.

    Now you'll move the bookmark into the correct location in the bookmark hierarchy.

  4. Drag the bookmark icon directly up and above the first bookmark in your Bookmarks list. (For the example in Figure 3, we dragged the Title Page bookmark above the Contents bookmark.) Release the bookmark when you see an arrow and dotted line where you want the new bookmark to appear.
    Figure 3

    Figure 3

  5. Choose File > Save to save your work.

    Test your new bookmark by selecting another bookmark to change the document window view and then selecting the new bookmark again.

Changing a Bookmark's Destination

  1. In the Bookmarks panel, click the icon for the bookmark whose destination you want to change. The document pane displays the selected page.
  2. Click the Next Page button or Previous Page button on the toolbar (see Figure 4) as many times as necessary to go to the desired page of the document—the page to which you want the bookmark to link.
    Figure 4

    Figure 4

  3. Click the Options button at the top of the Bookmarks panel and choose Set Bookmark Destination from the menu (see Figure 5). Click Yes to the confirmation message to update the bookmark destination.
    Figure 05

    Figure 5

  4. Choose File > Save to save the file.

Other Ways of Creating Bookmarks

You can add your own custom bookmarks and links to any PDF document by using the tools in Acrobat. Here are some methods for adding new bookmarks.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts

Many Acrobat commands can be executed using keyboard shortcuts. You can create a bookmark by using the keyboard shortcut for the New Bookmarks command.

  1. To create a new bookmark by using a keyboard shortcut, press Ctrl-B (Windows) or Command-B (Mac OS), and then name the bookmark. Click outside the bookmark to deselect it.
  2. In the document window, navigate to the page that you want to link with the bookmark.
  3. With the newly created bookmark selected in the Bookmarks panel, choose Set Bookmark Destination from the Options menu in the Bookmarks panel.

Automatically Setting the Correct Link

You can create, name, and automatically link a bookmark by selecting text in the document pane.

  1. Set the magnification of the page at the required level. Whatever magnification you use will be inherited by the bookmark.
  2. Click the Select tool in the toolbar.
  3. Move the I-beam pointer into the document page, and drag to highlight the text that you want to use as your bookmark.
  4. Click the New Bookmark icon at the top of the Bookmarks panel. A new bookmark is created in the Bookmarks list, and the highlighted text from the document pane is used as the bookmark name. By default, the new bookmark links to the current page view displayed in the document window.

Moving Bookmarks

After creating a bookmark, you can easily drag it to its proper place in the Bookmarks panel. You can move individual bookmarks or groups of bookmarks up and down in the list of bookmarks, and you can nest bookmarks.

For this example, we'll nest multiple bookmarks under the Contents bookmark.

  1. Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS) the desired bookmarks in the Bookmarks panel.
  2. Position the pointer on one of the selected bookmarks, hold down the mouse button, and drag the selected bookmarks up and under the target bookmark (the bookmark that you want to contain the nested bookmarks). When the arrow is below and to the right of the desired bookmark's icon, release the mouse button. In the example in Figure 6, we nested the bookmarks Company Overview, Features, A Look Inside, Schedule, Financial Data, and Conclusion under the Contents bookmark.
    Figure 6

    Figure 6

  3. Choose File > Save to save your work.