Adding Navigation to the Package - Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction - page 107

Strategy
Before randomly adding navigation features such as links or bookmarks to a document, plan a strategy for
your document or document collection. Your plan should consider several factors, including the content of
the document, how you project the user will navigate through the file, and the storage plans for the
document or documents. Should the package be a single file or multiple files?
The answer depends on how much control you will have over the published package. Is there a chance
someone will accidentally move a file or folder? If a file or folder is moved independently of the rest of the
package, then links and bookmarks can be broken, resulting in errors.
As you become familiar with Acrobat you will, of course, become more adept at planning a document's
navigation structure. For the beginner, a single file is probably the simplest approach, but keep in mind that
single files compiling information from an engineering/construction project can easily number 4,000 or
more pages.
Tom's first major PDF project was for the US Air Force: a single PDF file containing 3,383 pages. The
single file contained the entire project, and included CAD files from both MicroStation and AutoCAD,
source material from seven other programs, and scanned documents.
You may well ask yourself, “Doesn't it take a lot of time to build a big document like this?” The answer
is “yes” and “no.” If the clients intend to manage the project electronically, compiling all source material
into PDF format saves a tremendous amount of time over the paper route. In Tom's example, the Air Force
was not yet ready for electronic project management, so everything was done in both paper and PDF
format. To add navigation, each inserted document had its own bookmark, identifying its topic. All the
reader need do is click the appropriate bookmark to display the document in Acrobat. The user is not going
to page through a document of this size - navigation becomes the key.
Acrobat 6 versus Acrobat 7
In Acrobat 6, the link is set to a page number, so adding or deleting pages changes the link's location. To
ensure consistency in a link, you have to set named destinations. Advancements in Acrobat 7 let you set
links to a page view that is very similar to using a named destination, but many times easier.
Bookmarks
In Acrobat, bookmarks are the digital model for the pieces of paper you stick between pages to mark
important information. Unlike paper, a set of bookmarks in Acrobat is much neater and quite orderly.
Bookmarks are created in a variety of ways, as you will see in this chapter.
The Bookmarks pane shows a listing of linked bookmarks. The [+] in front of a bookmark means there
are nested bookmarks within the named bookmark that you see on expansion. A bookmark hierarchy that is
expanded shows a [ - ] to the left of the bookmark's name (Figure 9.1). The structure of the bookmark
hierarchy can be adjusted to change the hierarchical relationships between the bookmark levels, as you
learn later in the chapter.
About the Example
The project used for these screen shots is a 3,875-page Electronic Owner's Manual for a high school.
PDF manuals can save a tremendous amount of time in education maintenance.