There’s two more steps that I want to take with respect to navigation and it has to do with what the user is going to see when they look at something specific. For example the R5 Proposal document, right now the way it fits in the screen just happens to be in the way it was fitting in the screen when the bookmark was created. That’s not good enough. I want them to be able to see the document in its entirety. In other words; I want it to be zoomed out when they click on that bookmark. And however you create the bookmark, if you don’t set that up front, then you’ll end up with sort of a random view amount and I don’t want that. That’s another bookmark property that I’m going to change.
So I’m going to you roll over the bookmark again. I’m going to right click on the bookmark and choose Properties one more time, and now instead of working on the appearance, I’m actually going to work on the action for the bookmark. This Actions Panel is actually going to appear a number of different times when I’m working in Acrobat. And it’s an important panel because it allows me to determine what action something takes when I click on it. In this case, the action is Go to a Page in This Document, so when I click the button, it goes to a particular page. You can see that it takes you to page two. That’s what I want, but the zoom level is Fit With, and that’s not what I want. I want it to fit the entire page. To change that, I’m going to select the action here and click Edit. This brings up the Go to This Page in The Document dialogue box, which allows me to edit the action itself. I want to use the same page number but I want to change the zoom in here so here’s where I can do that. Instead of Fit With, I want to select Fit Page. Click OK, click OK, and then I’ll go to just some other location in the document. I’ll click on the R5 Proposal, and now, when I click on that bookmark, it’s going to take me not just to that page but to that specific zoom for that page. That can be very important if for example you’re trying to show an entire document as opposed to expecting the end user if they should see the document looking this way, to know that they need to scroll down in order to see something that you want them to see in the document.
I’m going to carry that concept though, one step further, because when I open this document, I wanted to open to a particular view. I don’t want it to open to whatever view the user happen to have their Acrobat setup when they were working on the last document they saw. To do that, I’m going to go to File, Properties, and in the Properties dialogue box for the file, there are a number of different properties that I can work with. The one I’m interested in is Initial View, and I want two things to happen: A. I want them to see the Bookmarks Panel when they open the document because I’ve set bookmarks up there that are very important – the Finance Payment Bookmark, the Proposal Bookmark, this specific bookmark. I don’t want them to have to know that they should open this panel in order to access this because they might not know Acrobat well enough to even know that bookmarks exist.
So under navigation tab, I’m going to choose instead of Page Only, Bookmarks Panel and Page, and for Page Layout, I’m going to select Single Page, because I don’t want them to change the layout of the document in any way, shape or form. And for the magnification, I don’t want default. I want Fit Page. That will set it so that when Acrobat opens this file or even the free Reader opens this file, it’s going to behave a specific way. It makes the process a lot more predictable. I’ll say OK. I’m going to save the document. Once the document is saved, I’m going to close it because I want to demonstrate how this works. And then from the File Menu I’ll just choose Open Recent File, complete proposal was the document I was working on, and notice that when it opened, it opened the Bookmarks Panel and it’s at the first page to the Fit Page in Window. That will happen no matter what the end user had their Acrobat or Reader configured to and so it’s a great way to start the navigation process off so that they can see what them to see, and get at the things that they want to see in one nice easy package.