The great thing about PDF documents is that they look exactly like the original document from which they were created but people don't need to buy the software to view them. They just need to download Acrobat Reader, a free utility, from Adobe's web site.

PDFs are a great thing but it is often difficult to find a particular piece of information just by scrolling through the document. Bookmarks make navigation less painful by allowing the user to get to a specific place in the document by just clicking a link.

Once you have created a PDF, spending a few minutes making it more interactive will increase its usefulness to anyone who opens it. Bookmarks are a simple way of creating this interactivily and increasing your chances of your PDF influencing potential customers.

The bookmarks panel is standard feature of all versions of Acrobat including the free reader. To make it visible, the user clicks on the View menu, then on Navigation Panels then on Bookmarks. To use a bookmark, the user just clicks on it and is taken to the page with which the bookmark has been associated.

Hopefully, you will agree that bookmarks are worth created. Howver, they cannot be created with the free Reader version of Adobe Acrobat: you need to buy either Adobe Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, the two non-free versions of Acrobat. Having said that, you also need these packages to be able to produce your PDF files anyway.

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.

If this all sounds a bit tedious then let's look at a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, instead of typing a name for a bookmark, you can use the selection tool (located next to the hand tool on the toolbar) to highlight some text on the page then, when you choose New Bookmark, the highlighted text will be used as the name of the bookmark. Also, you can use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark: Control-B.

It is also possible to use software which will create bookmarks automatically like AutoBookmark. This utility scans a document and examines its structure recognising headings by the font sizes, alignment and indentation levels. It then automatically generates a hierarchy of bookmarks to pages where headings are found.

If you have Microsoft Office and any full version of Acrobat, you may have noticed a nice little utility for creating PDFs. It adds a toolbar and menu to each Office program on your machine.

When you create a PDF using the PDFMaker utility, any text formatted with Word's heading styles ("Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc.) will automatically be converted to PDF bookmarks as will entries in indexes and tables of content. Similarly, if you PDF an Excel workbook using PDFMaker, bookmarks to each worksheet will automatically be created. In PowerPoint, bookmarks to each slide in your presentation will be generated for you.

It should come as no surprise to you to learn that Adobe InDesign has a similar utility which creates bookmarks automatically. However, this time, the PDF feature is inherent in the program, so you don't need to buy a full version of Acrobat. Two other DTP packages also offer an equivalent PDF creation facility: InDesign's big rival QuarkXPress and the little-known but brilliant Serif PagePlus.

Bookmarks are a lot more flexible than people realize: they do much more than simply taking the user to a particular page. Also, its not actually a link to a page that bookmarks link to, it's the view of that page that was current when the bookmark is created. Thus, for example, if you create a bookmark after zooming in on a particular item on the page, that bookmark will take the user back to that same zoom whenever it is clicked.

And what about all the other stuff you can get bookmarks to do? Well, the first thing will be to remove the default action. Right-click the bookmark and then activate the Actions tab. Next, select the "Go to a page in this document" action that was created by default and click on the Delete button. Select a different action from the drop-down at the top of the screen and then click Add.

Adobe have realized that it is possible that your bookmarks will not be seen by people opening your PDF. Perhaps they don't open their Bookmarks panel or perhaps they don't even know what a bookmark is.

So, they created a nice setting which allows you to specify which panels are open when the user first opens the file. To access this feature, just choose File - Properties then click on the tab marked Initial View. Set the Navigation Panels drop-down to "Bookmarks Panel and Page". That way the Bookmarks will be opened whenever your document loads.

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The author runs training courses with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent IT training company offering Adobe Acrobat training courses in central London and throughout the UK.