Automating the creation of bookmarks

Bookmarks in Acrobat open in the Bookmarks pane. They work a bit like a table of contents, but instead of being placed on a document page, they are located in a pane. Bookmarks can be added in Acrobat; however, the most efficient way to add them, especially in long documents, is to use InDesign functions. There are two ways to create them in InDesign:

• The automatic way, using settings to generate a table of contents
• The manual way, using the InDesign Bookmarks panel

We will explore both methods next. Here are the steps for the first method, the automatic one.

Creating bookmarks using a generated table of contents

We will generate a table of contents that builds entries based on headings formatted with paragraph styles. This will also allow us to create bookmarks based on the same headings. Here are the steps:

1. Open an InDesign document that consistently uses styles for headings. I will continue working with the example...