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The following is a short excerpt from the upcoming book The Lawyer's Guide to Adobe Acrobat, Second Edition. Reprinted with permission.

Navigation aids, such as bookmarks and links, make PDF files more powerful than their paper counterparts. When bookmarks outline the major and minor divisions of a lengthy brief or contract, reference to each section is only a click away. A disparate stack of discovery documents can be quickly reviewed and each separate document within the collection marked with a bookmark. Bookmarks are the quick way to organize and provide navigation in PDF files.

Think of bookmarks as an easily created hyperlinked table of contents. Links are similar to bookmarks in that they can take you, or any other viewer of a PDF file, from point A to point B with a click of the mouse. Unlike bookmarks, which appear in the navigation pane external to the document, links exist internally within documents. Links within PDF files are much like links within Web pages—click here (on the link) and go to a different page. Links can be used within PDF files to take the reader to other pieces of information, not just to other PDF files. Online or virtual page numbers make Bates numbers or record index page numbers correspond to physical document page numbers, thus enabling the reader to navigate by using the Go To Page n function.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a powerful feature to aid navigation in PDF documents, especially large documents. For little effort, bookmarks produce big returns in document organization and navigation. Again, think of bookmarks as an electronic table of contents that links each entry to the material referenced within the document. Clicking on a bookmark in the Bookmarks pane of the navigation window takes you directly to the referenced material. The table-of-contents elements created by some desktop publishing programs become bookmarks when those documents are printed (converted) to PDF. Bookmarks can be quickly added to image-only PDFs created by scanning. Adding bookmarks to a one-hundred-page image-only PDF can be accomplished in a matter of minutes; once done, this powerful hyperlinked table of contents exists for all other users of the document. Bookmarks can be nested to show a hierarchical order, color coded, revised, added, and deleted at any time (as long as document security settings permit).

Using Bookmarks with Litigation Documents

Bookmarks can be used to organize and navigate document collections produced in litigation. For example, opposing counsel has delivered five hundred pages of medical records. These pages can be scanned to a single PDF file and bookmarks added. The bookmarks could be one for each discrete record, or grouped by treating physician. The initial review and bookmarking can be performed by staff or by a lawyer. This first quick trip through the documents to add bookmarks provides an opportunity for the lawyer to make a preliminary assessment of the content, and adding bookmarks provides a lasting organizational scheme to quickly navigate within the document. While bookmarks look and act like a hyperlinked table of contents (a linear depiction of subject matter within a document), with a little imagination they can be used in a nonlinear fashion and consequently put to a slightly different purpose. Rather than creating bookmarks that describe the referenced materials linearly by subject, consider creating a set of bookmarks that reflect issues (liability, damages, and so on).

The issue bookmarks would be the primary level of a bookmark hierarchy, with nested marks using content- or subject-descriptive titles to link each portion of a document to an issue. This Arrangement would be nonlinear insofar as the issues need not be listed in the order of appearance within a document; the nested marks might even be coded and ranked by the power or weight with which the referenced material supports the parent issue.

Creating Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be created in a variety of ways, some more complicated than others. The preferred method is the simplest. To quickly create a bookmark:

1. Press Ctrl+B.
2. Type a short description.
3. Press Enter.

The simple command (Ctrl+B) opens the Bookmarks tab on the navigation pane and adds a blank bookmark to the end of the list; typing a short description names the bookmark, and pressing the Enter key completes the process. If you prefer working with the Acrobat user interface, to create a
bookmark do the following:

1. Click the Bookmarks tab in the navigation pane.
2. Click the bookmark after which you want to place the new bookmark.
   If you don’t select a bookmark, the new bookmark is automatically added at the end of the list.
3. Choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the navigation
   pane.
4. Select the new bookmark and do one of the following:
   a) Choose View > Toolbars > Properties, and choose a color and
   style for the text
   b) Right-click and select Properties. Click the Appearance tab, and
   choose a color and style for the text; you can open the Bookmark
   Properties dialog box by clicking the More button on the Properties
   toolbar
5. On the Bookmarks tab, select the Untitled label of the new bookmark
   and type the text you want.

After you have defined a bookmark’s appearance, you can reuse the appearance
settings by selecting the bookmark, right-clicking, and choosing Use Current Appearance as New Default.

Bookmarking Selected Text or Image

In image-on-text PDF files, bookmarks can be targeted to specific text or graphics. Remember, image-on-text files are created by printing text-based documents to PDF or processing image-only files with an OCR application. Bookmarks that link to selected text can be particularly useful to direct readers to specific passages within a document. For example, you might print a case to PDF and highlight a section that you want the court or opposing counsel to focus on. A bookmark linked to the selected text would take the reader to the highlighted passage.

Bookmarks to selected text take the reader directly to the referenced information. Recall that Acrobat has three standard page views: Actual Size, Fit Page, and Fit Width. When documents are displayed in the Actual Size or Fit Width view, only a portion of the current page appears in the work area. If you create a bookmark that links to a page and the information that you want the reader to see happens to be at the bottom of the page, the relationship may not be apparent. However, if you create a bookmark by selecting text, then clicking on the mark takes the reader to the exact location in the document where the text appears, and the relationship is apparent. onsider using Select Text to create bookmarks that correspond to headings in a contract, brief, or other long image-on-text PDF files.

To create a bookmark that targets specific text:

1. Click on the Select Text tool on the toolbar.
2. Select the text (the selected text becomes the label of the new bookmark;
   you can edit the label).
3. Press Ctrl+B.
4. Press Enter.

If you prefer working with the Acrobat user interface, to create a bookmark do the following:

Select the Select Text tool on the toolbar and do one of the following:

a) Drag to select the text (the selected text becomes the label of the new bookmark; you can edit the label)
b) Right-click and choose Add Bookmark

A process similar to that described above for creating bookmarks using the Select Text tool can used for creating bookmarks that are linked to specific graphics or portions of graphics. The Select Graphic tool is used in place of the Select Text tool and the bookmark label must be typed (the graphic or portion of a graphic selected does not supply the bookmark label).

For more information on Bookmarks, order David Masters' book, The Lawyer's Guide to Adobe Acroabat, Second Edition today.

Learn more at ABA TECHSHOW 2005, March 31-April 2, 2005

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David Masters is a small-firm general practitioner in Montrose, Colorado. His practice focuses on real estate and business matters, transactions, and litigation, including personal injury, construction law, civil rights, and employment law matters, for both plaintiffs and defendants. He writes and speaks frequently on the use of technology in the practice of law. Mr. Masters has written a new chapter on electronic briefs for the Colorado Appellate Practice Guide, published by Continuing Legal Education in Colorado Inc. He has also contributed a chapter on Adobe® Acrobat® to Flying Solo: A Survival Guide for Solo Lawyers, Fourth Edition, to be published in early 2005 by the ABA Law Practice Management Section.