Bookmarking Tip for Acrobat

Knowing how to create bookmarks is important if you are going to efficiently navigate your PDFs.  This one of many reasons why you need the full version of Acrobat.  I talked to a patent attorney in Kansas the other day who reviews information from the Patent office that is made available in PDF format. But, he only has the basic Adobe Reader.  He obviously spends a lot of time navigating PDFs, and often returns to the same PDF later on to find information he has reviewed previously.

This is a person who needs the full version of Acrobat.  And he needs to learn how to bookmark pages so he can quickly return to them later on.  The first thing you should do when you get Acrobat (after setting up your default viewing preferences) is to learn the shortcut for creating a bookmark. In Windows it's CONTROL + B, and in Mac it's COMMAND + B.

Now here's the really cool bookmarking tip that you can use PDF you are in is text-based (i.e. 'searchable').  You'll know it's searchable if you can highlight a word or sentence of text.  So, let's say you've highlighted a passage and you want to tag that as a bookmark.  If you highlight it and then use the shortcut for creating a bookmark Acrobat will create the bookmark and name it with the text that you highlighted.

I'm not sure if this works in older versions of Acrobat, but I can say that it definitely works in Acrobat 9.0.  One way I use it is when I create a PDF of, say, a complaint or other document that has headings.  I can quickly go through the document and highlight each heading and create a bookmark.  Then when I open that document later on my bookmarks are essentially a table of contents of the main parts of that document.

Comments

[yclipse]

Here is another bookmarking tip: automatic bookmarks based on headers in the document.

[Larry Kasoff]

I know you aren't one to tout free or low cost alternatives to Acrobat, but for what it is worth:

You can get the bookmarking features you describe here for free in FoxIt Reader, an alternative to Adobe Reader. Only the shortcut is different.

FoxIt Reader also gives you annotation and some other capabilities of the full version of Acrobat for free. It is often faster and uses less memory than Acrobat Reader. When combined with a free print to PDF printer driver, it is a viable alternative to the full version of Acrobat -- especially for staff computers or laptops that are only used occasionally.

And, no I don't work for FoxIt. I'm just a very satisfied user.