Using Bookmarks to open files and other tricks

One of the unknown features of the Bookmark feature in Acrobat is that you can use it to open a file. Just go to an existing bookmark and right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Mac). Then pick "Properties" and you see a tab for "actions" and one of the choices is "Open File." So now you see that you can use a bookmark to open a file, or a bunch of other things (i.e. open a weblink etc.).

Now, why would you want to do that? Good question, which my co-author Dave Fishel recently explained in an online seminar.

You could use this technique to great advantage if you wanted to create a blank PDF document that simply had links to other key documents, files, web-pages, images, or whatever. Think "trial notebook." And the best part of this trick is that the links are hierarchical, which means if you have the Master PDF and all of its other files in a group of folders you can move the entire group to a new location and the links will still work. In other words, the links are relative links. Pretty cool, huh?

Comments

[Patrick Curran]

Adobe Acrobat's Bookmarks are very useful for managing discovery materials and depositions. I scan all medical and other records, and obtain depositions in pdf format, to create a paperless file. Bookmarks serve as a Table of Contents, and allow me to find a specific item in the scanned records or deposition transcripts. I will use the Bookmark "Open File" action to link a transcript with a medical record, for example. In addition, I use Adobe's highlighting, underlining and note tools to annotate the records and transcripts.

[Rampy]

Is it possible to Bookmark to documents attached to a pdf?

[Martin]

I already knew this..
i use it at my work.. we create a databook with several PDF files.

but it is a little unhandy to manualy bookmark each file..

Does someone know a trick to do this automatic.. in the same structure the folders are ?

Im seaching crazy and i just cant find it. i cant believe somthing so easy and obviouse just nog exists