Inserting Document Comments with the Commenting Toolbar

In its original state, the Commenting toolbar displays the buttons for four tools — Note, Indicate Text Edits, Stamp tool, and Highlight Text — that you can use to annotate your PDF document, as well as the Show button that is used to display or hide (also known as filtering) comments in your PDF document. Three of the tool buttons, Indicate Text Edits, Stamp tool, and Highlight Text, contain pop-up menus that you can click to display additional features for the selected tool.
When you click the pop-up menu button on the Indicate Text Edits tool, it displays options for marking up edited text selections. You normally use this group of commands in conjunction with the Indicate Text Edits tool to perform various markups on selected text in PDF document you’re reviewing for the benefit of other review participants. These self-explanatory options include Insert Text at Cursor, Replace Selected Text, Highlight Selected Text, Add Note to Selected Text, Cross Out Text for Deletion, and Highlight Selected Text, among others. When you click the pop-up menu button on the Stamp tool, it displays all the options for using the electronic rubber stamp feature in Acrobat 6.
When you click the pop-up menu button on the Highlight tool, it displays different highlighting tools — Cross-Out Text tool and the Underline Text tool, in addition to the standard Highlighter tool. You usually use this group of tools to draw attention to text in the PDF document you’re reviewing that needs some type of editing (normally deletion, when you use the Cross-Out Text tool) or emphasizing (when you use the Underline Text tool). See the “Hitting the highlights” section, later in this chapter, for details. Note that Acrobat saves all notations that you add with Commenting and Advanced Commenting tools on a distinct and invisible top layer of the PDF document, keeping them separate from the PDF document text and graphics underneath. This makes it possible for you to import comments from other reviewers and add them to the PDF document, as well as to summarize all comments made in the document and export them as a separate file.

Renaming and deleting bookmarks

If you aren’t happy with a name of a particular bookmark, you can rename it in a snap:

1. Right-click (Control+click on the Mac) the name of the bookmark whose name needs changing in the Bookmarks palette and click Rename on the context menu.
2. Replace the existing name by typing the new name and then pressing Enter (Return on the Mac) or by clicking the mouse pointer somewhere outside of the bookmark name.

To delete a bookmark, right-click (Control+click on the Mac) the bookmark in
the Navigation pane and then click Delete on its context menu

Changing the page destination for a bookmark

If you find that you’ve linked a bookmark that goes to the wrong page, you can easily edit just its destination by taking these few steps:

1. Using the buttons on the Navigation toolbar or navigation buttons on the Document window status bar, go to the correct destination page in the document for the bookmark.
2. Right-click (Control+click on the Mac) the name of the bookmark whose destination needs editing in the Bookmarks palette and click Set Destination on the context menu.
3. Click Yes in the alert dialog box that asks you if you’re certain that you want to make this change.

To test the edited destination, click the buttons on the Navigation toolbar or on the Document window status bar to move to a new page, and then click the bookmark to make sure that it now takes you to the right page.

Making bookmarks to go to pages in the document

When you create a new bookmark to another page in the same PDF document, Acrobat records not only the page but also the page view and the magnification setting in effect as part of the bookmark’s destination. This means that the most productive way to create manual bookmarks is to first navigate to the destination page and make any desired change to the page view and/or magnification settings before you begin creating the bookmark. Although you can designate the destination page as part of the process of creating the new bookmark, going to the page and setting things up beforehand just makes the process all the easier and more efficient.

With this tip in mind, the steps for manually creating a bookmark to a new page in the same document are as follows:

1. Launch Acrobat and then open the PDF document to which you want to add bookmarks.

2. If necessary, open the Navigation pane by pressing F6 and click the Bookmarks tab to display its palette on top.

3. Using the buttons on the Navigation toolbar or navigation buttons on the Document window status bar, go to the destination page in the document for the first bookmark.

4. If you want the destination page to be displayed in a different page view or magnification, select the appropriate options from the View menu or click the appropriate buttons on Zoom toolbar and the Document status bar.

5. Choose the New Bookmark command on the Options menu at the top of the Bookmarks palette or right-click the Document window to open its context menu, and then click New Bookmark (you can also press Ctrl+B on Windows or Ô+B on the Mac). A new bookmark icon named Untitled is added.

6. Type a descriptive name for your new bookmark and then press the Enter key (Return on the Mac) or click the mouse pointer somewhere outside of the bookmark name to add it to the list in the Bookmarks palette.

How to generate automated bookmarks?

When you use the PDFMaker plug-in to convert documents created with Microsoft Word for Windows to PDF, you can specify that the document heading and other styles, cross-references, and footnotes automatically be converted into bookmarks in the final PDF file. Also, when capturing Web pages, Acrobat can automatically generate bookmarks for each page that you capture. When the Add Bookmarks to Adobe PDF option is selected during conversion, the bookmarks automatically generated from Word documents with the PDFMaker 6.0 and from Web pages in Acrobat 6 are saved as a special type called tagged bookmarks. Tagged bookmarks keep track of the underlying structure of the document (such as heading levels and paragraph styles in Word documents and HTML tags in Web pages) by tagging these elements. You can use the elements stored in any tagged PDF document or captured Web page to automatically generate bookmarks for any particular element in the document. To generate automatic bookmarks for a tagged file, click the Options pop-up menu on the Bookmarks palette and then click New Bookmarks from Structure on the menu to open the Structure Elements dialog box. Note that the New Bookmarks from Structure menu item is grayed out if the PDF document you’re working with isn’t tagged


To have Acrobat generate bookmarks for particular elements in the PDF document, you then select the names of the elements for which you want the bookmarks generated (Ctrl+click on Windows or Control+click on the Mac to select multiple elements) in the Structure Elements dialog box before you click OK. Acrobat then goes through the document, identifying the tags for the selected elements and generating bookmarks for each of them. Figure illustrates how this works. In this figure, you see a group of four automatically generated bookmarks created from the Figure tag in the original tagged PDF document. As you can see, when Acrobat generates these tags, it gives them the name of the tagged element used to create them (which in this case just happened to be Figure). These four Figure tags are automatically nested under a generic bookmark named Untitled. All that remains to do is to rename these bookmarks to something a little bit more descriptive, such as Table of Figures for the Untitled bookmark, Cover for the first Figure bookmark, Title Page for the second, Half Title Page for the third, and Copyright for the fourth and last bookmark.

The Ins and Outs of Bookmarks

Bookmarks are the links that appear on the Bookmarks palette in the Navigation pane in a PDF document. They are most often used to take you directly to different sections within the document. Bookmarks can take you to different pages in the document or even different views of a page. Bookmarks can also link you to different documents (PDF and non-PDF) on your computer, as well as to Web pages on the Internet. All of these functions make bookmarks perfect for providing review participants with a quick means of navigating to annotations and markups you make in a PDF document review cycle.

As if this weren’t enough, bookmarks can also perform certain actions in the PDF document, such as submitting a form’s data, playing a sound or movie, or selecting a particular menu item. To use a bookmark to jump to a particular page or page view, to open a new document or Web page, or to execute a command or perform a specified action, all you have to do is click the name or icon of the bookmark in the Bookmarks palette in the Navigation pane. If you want, you can have Acrobat automatically close the Navigation pane whenever you click a bookmark by selecting the Hide After Use setting on the Options pop-up menu at the top of the Navigation pane. This option is particularly useful for bookmarks that open pages in the document that are displayed in the Fit Width or Fit Visible page views and require maximum screen area for legibility.