PDF bookmarks can drastically improve the navigability of longer PDF documents. Luckily, it’s a snap to create single book marks using Adobe Acrobat Pro. It’s even easier to create lots of book marks with Debenu PDF Aerialist and let’s face it, how often will you need to create one book mark? It’s more likely you will need to create 10 or more.
We get sent e-books from time to time, one was from Marketo. It frustrated me that there were no bookmarks for me to easily navigate the document so I decided to make some of my own.
So here is how you do it in about 11 steps. This is why Debenu PDF Aerialist is the Ultimate PDF Plug-in.
Step 1
Open the document in Adobe Acrobat Pro (make sure you have Debenu PDF Aerialist installed).
Step 2
In Debenu PDF Aerialist 11, click bookmarks.
Step 3
Click Build Bookmarks from the scroll down menu
Step 4
A box appears, with a number of options. Select level 1. This will help create the first bookmark.
Step 5
Scroll through the document and find when a heading for the first Bookmark you want to make occurs. Use your cursor to select all or part of the text. In this example there are two headings (parts and the sections in each part).
Debenu PDF Aerialist auto populates based on the colour, font, and size of the text.A range of options that can be chosen that will target the text after you have selected it.
The example below from the Marketo document is the information related to the selected text.
Step 6
Click build. Aerialist will scan the document for text that matches the variables for the Level 1 bookmarks.
As can be seen only two bookmarks are created, but there are four sections in total. But why is this? Let’s scroll down a to ‘Part 3’ and use PDF Aerialist to tell us if it is the same. There is a simple explanation for this.
Step 7
Highlight ‘Part Three’. Paying attention to if the font changes at all, and what remains the same.
The font is slightly different! But the size is the same.
The creator used a slightly different font when creating the original document. De-Select ‘Font Name’, and make sure ‘Font Size’ is the only thing selected.
Step 8
Level 1 bookmarks will be made on the basis of size 32 fonts. Click build. And four bookmarks appear. One for each section like the table of contents indicates.
Step 9
There are two types of headings the main one (Parts One – Four) and their sub headings e.g. ‘The Importance of Lead Nurturing’.
Click Level 2 and highlight a portion of text that correspondents to the sub headings.
Step 10
Make sure you select multi-line headings, as some of the headings stretch over two lines.
Step 11
Click build.
Bookmarks are populated as per the levels selected. The PDF file now has all the bookmarks needed to make it an easy to navigate document.
Well done!
This is for Debenu PDF Aerialist, which is a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Pro. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat Pro and Debenu PDF Aerialist to do this. There is however another product we produce called Debenu PDF Maximus which can also generate bookmarks, this is stand alone software and does not need Adobe Acrobat to run.
