Recently I received a proposal from a company who had some technology I was interested in. The proposal was accompanied by some supporting materials – some PowerPoint slides and a spreadsheet of costings. To their credit they had pulled all this stuff together into a single PDF attachment, exactly the type of task our product, gDoc Fusion, is so good at. But I found when I opened the attachment that they had missed a trick or two. Firstly, there was nothing to guide me to the pertinent sections. I got started anyway, but when reading it, I found I needed to go back and forth between various sections; it wasn’t a linear read. That’s OK, PDF is good at that sort of thing. But it would have been so much easier if there had been some bookmarks. Bookmarks are a hierarchical list of hypertext links – an active table of contents. They are easy to create and maintain, yet they are infrequently used. They make navigating, therefore understanding, a document much easier. If your document is intended to persuade the reader of a particular course of action, any aid to quicker comprehension must be welcome.
This is not a “how to”, rather a plea to “do so”. Consequently I won’t dwell on how to add bookmarks – you can find that in the help file – but I will share a few tips. Tip number one: If you can get your authoring software to make bookmarks, then let it! It is obviously easier to maintain the bookmarks in the authoring application than having to update them when the content changes. I like to use Microsoft Word, and to get bookmarks all I have to do is use Heading styles consistently. This is also the way that Word uses to generate a table of contents, so you get both. If your Word document has been styled with the Normal style throughout, this mechanism isn’t going to work.
Tip number two: Create the bookmark and destination on one go. When adding a rage number of bookmarks, I first navigate to the view I want the reader to have of the document, swipe some text that corresponds to the bookmark, then type Ctrl-B. In gDoc (and other PDF software) this creates a bookmark, labelled with the text that was selected, that will link to the current view. Continue through the document, scrolling or otherwise navigating to the right view and creating further bookmarks.
Bookmarks are not the only ‘value add’ that can make the life of the recipient of your document easier; hypertext links within the body of the document can help too, and again Word provides an easy method of creating these – just add cross-reference links. You will need to make the PDF using the gDoc Add-in to Word, which is available as part of gDoc Creator from our website, free of charge.
Finally, it’s important to let your reader know that bookmarks are available. In gDoc Fusion, type Ctrl-D and choose Navigation: Open to Bookmarks on the Open Settings panel. Alternatively, use File> Finish Document Wizard. This procedure steps you through this and other settings to ensure your document is presented in a PDF viewer in the right way.

My wife (Jill) was very jealous; I was going to a conference in one of her favourite places, Las Vegas, accompanied by Riccardo Taffarello our HCI designer, a good personal friend. According to Jill I was going to have excellent fun! Now I’m back and the claim that we ventured out very briefly one evening onto “The Strip” is interpreted as a classic “What happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” cover story.

Mix10 was a Microsoft conference to show new technology to website developers and designers. Riccardo and I don’t create websites so it may seem a strange conference to attend. There were two reasons for us being there. First we wanted to look at Silverlight 4 which is one of the technologies behind the migration from standard desktop applications towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Second, we expected that Riccardo’s designer DNA would be stimulated, prompting new ideas for future gDoc user experiences. We weren’t disappointed. There was a fantastic wealth of user experience knowledge at the conference and an incredible energy amongst the delegates.

At the beginning of the conference both Riccardo and I decided that we would both go to Bill Buxton’s session, “An Hour with Bill Buxton” (http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/DS16.mp4 ). Having read Bill Buxton’s excellent book (“Sketching User Experiences”) I couldn’t resist the chance to hear him speak in person. He explored the role of designers in the software creation process. It was an energetic session and gave Riccardo and me a lot to think about.

Ironically at the same time in the next room there was an equally good presentation by Anthony Franco, “The Effective Laws of Good User Experience” (http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/DS01.mp4 ) going on. He explained the return on investment for good user experience design. He also outlined a number of user experience laws that must be followed. All of the sessions were videoed (which is how I got to watch this one) and I highly recommend that you watch Anthony Franco’s session if you’re interested making user experience the core of your product.

There were two key note speeches during the conference. The first keynote introduced Silverlight 4.0 and went on to talk about the Windows Phone 7 development kit. The second keynote presentation talked about what Microsoft are doing with HTML 5 and how Internet Explorer 9 will be GPU accelerated. The demonstrations they showed were pretty impressive, browser hosted fast smooth 3D animations and HD videos on a low powered net book.

Whilst watching the keynote I noticed that XPS graphics printing appeared on a slide. I followed this up with Microsoft after the conference and they let me know that the printing plan hasn’t been finalised yet for IE9. The HTML 5 demos in the keynote had a lot of transparency effects and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that IE9 will be able to print rich content to the XPS printer path in Windows. This would allow gDoc Creator to produce rich PDF content from graphics rich web pages.

Coming from an electronic document background I also went to Dr Kevin Larson’s, “The Art, Technology and Science of Reading” (http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/DS07.mp4 ) session. Not being a font expert I found some of the experiments enlightening. Kevin showed the readability benefits of the first version of ClearType and went on to show how ClearType has been improved in Windows 7.

The final session that made a big impact on me was Joshua Blake’s “Developing Natural User Interfaces with Microsoft Silverlight and WPF 4 Touch” (http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/EX18.mp4 ). The session helped me nail down what constitutes a NUI (Natural User Interface). Joshua also showed the extent to which levels of support for multi-touch features varied in WPF and Silverlight. Joshua didn’t use PowerPoint for his presentation, he used a multi-touch application he had developed himself. It continuously zoomed and panned between topics and was a great way to illustrate the concepts he was presenting. I was lucky enough to have a chance to chat with him after the session and explore some of the things we are doing at Global Graphics.

Over all it was an inspirational conference and there was a good balance of sessions focused on science, creativity and the business of user-experience design. We saw some great technology and came back to the office buzzing with new ideas to include in gDoc products (http://www.globalgraphics.com/en/gdoc/ ).