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.