Can an Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolio have bookmarks?

Learn a simple workaround in Acrobat 9 for your PDF Portfolios that gives you bookmarks without a lot of work.

By Rick Borstein – July 21, 2009

 

People just love bookmarks, the TOC-like panel that lets you jump from page to page in a PDF:

People like Bookmarks so much, they wish they could have the same organization tool for a PDF Portfolio, which is a collection of individual documents in a PDF container.

While PDF Portfolios don't have bookmarks per se, I do have a workaround that might make many of you happy.

Before I get started . . .

Because I know someone will call me out on this, I should explain that the PDF Portfolio cover sheet can actually have bookmarks. If you open a Portfolio and choose View > Portfolio > Cover Sheet, you can add bookmarks to the "backbone" PDF file. However, it is very challenging to move between the cover sheet and the actual documents, so I don't find this to be a great solution.

Rick's Workaround

You can get many of the benefits of bookmarks without a lot of work through this simple workaround to split your screen.

This procedure allows you to easily "walk" across the documents in a PDF Portfolio in a bookmark-like manner.

Here's how:

1. Open a PDF Portfolio
2. Go to the List View



3. The screen should look something like this:



4. Choose Window > Split Vertical.

Your screen will now look like this:



5. Click on any of the documents in the left panel to preview them on the right:

It's not perfect

There are a few limitations on this workaround:

1. Acrobat does not automatically preview the first file in the list. We have this logged as a bug. It's not a deal breaker, but a little inconvenient.
2. After you close the Portfolio, the view settings are not retained. You will need to go back to List View and split again.

Enjoy!