Jun 19 2009
Bookmarks/TOC in InDesign CS4: Follow-up
My thanks to Bob Bringhurst of Adobe Systems for adding a comment to the earlier post. I thought it deserved its own post, since he was kind enough to share: Bob’s blog post is here.
In the circumstance that prompted my earlier post, a customer needs to add a TOC to the first page of their multi-page InDesign files in order to generate bookmarks in the exported PDFs. That’s the only purpose the TOC serves. For various reasons having to do with workflow and tracking, they can’t add an extra page (this is a retail environment, and they’re using multiple pages to hold multiple versions).
The solution is a bit of a kludge, but it works: they create the TOC, and then position the TOC text frame in the pasteboard, overlapping the left edge of the page by just a skosh. The text itself is off in the pasteboard, and doesn’t appear in the page when the PDF is generated.
There’s (almost) always a way 
Thanks so much – I have spent a couple hours trying to get this to work in CS4 since I knew it worked in CS3…Is there any way to bookmark the footnotes? so they are included also? I do have a paragraph style for them but when I include them in my table of contents it is hard to get it all to fit and it doesn’t seem to be in the correct order of the document. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
The TOC process picks up the entire paragraph, thus your long entries from footnotes. But you can manually create bookmarks: choose Window > Interactive > Bookmarks to open the Bookmarks panel. Select a bit of the footnote text and click the New Bookmark icon on the bottom of the panel (or choose New Bookmark from the panel menu). This attaches a bookmark to the location of the footnote text. You’ll probably want to rename the bookmark: just select it in the Bookmarks panel, and choose Rename Bookmark from the panel menu.
The catch is that this won’t create a TOC entry, and, as you found, the bookmark falls at the end of the list of bookmarks in the resulting PDF. In a short file, it’s easy to reposition them in the Bookmarks list, but that’s no fun in a longer file.
So I’m not sure I’m really any help here
I have created a 160 page document in InDesign CS4. The contents page needs bookmarks in order for the chapters/reference sections etc to be accessed quickly, I’ve successfully applied bookmarks into my CS4 indesign document and they work perfectly when converted into a pdf file.
My Problem? How will this work in my reflowed accessible pdf file (for visually impaired people) when I’ve listened to this myself, the chapter page is simply read out without any reference to the bookmark applied: how does the reader jump to their preferred chapter quickly?
I’m probably missing something very simple (…and as I’m new to this type of conversion, that’s not surprising I guess)
Please help…I’m beginning to lose the will!!
Cecilia,
If you haven’t already, check out this PDF from Adobe on creating accessible PDFs:
I did a little experiment with adding alternate text, and it does allow you to insert text that’s read by Acrobat’s screen-reading feature (I don’t have access to a “real” screen reading application). But it’s so fast that it just rolls in with the surrounding text, and I don’t know how it would help a visually-impaired reader. They couldn’t respond fast enough to click on the bookmark.
I’m afraid I’m not much help here…