gDoc

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.