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Chapter 3. Adding Interactivity to PDF Files

In This Chapter

• Adding interactive bookmarks

• Creating and editing links

• Using buttons for easy navigation

Because many Adobe PDF documents are viewed online, you need to make the documents easy for readers to navigate. With Acrobat, you can design documents that are easier to navigate than their printed counterparts and that include rich interactive features that simply aren't available with paper documents.

Rather than making readers scroll through a document to find what they want, you can add links within an index or a table of contents, or you can add links to Web sites and e-mail addresses. Acrobat also includes features (known as bookmarks) to build your own online table of contents, and you can add buttons that link to specific pages within a PDF document or that cause an action to occur when clicked, such as closing the document. We discuss all these features in this chapter.

Adding Bookmarks to Ease PDF Navigation

One reason for distributing PDF documents is that it's convenient and cost-effective. But if users can't easily find the information they need or they can't effectively understand how the contents of a file are structured, they may become frustrated or they may need to print the document, which defeats the purpose of electronic distribution.

A table of contents in a traditional, printed book doesn't work well with electronic PDF files. It requires you to constantly return to the page containing the table of contents and then ...