From the course: InDesign Secrets

208 Navigating through pages with bookmarks - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

208 Navigating through pages with bookmarks

- Long documents are often broken down into sections or parts. For example, books like this one are usually broken down into chapters and headings. Catalogs are often broken down into categories, directories might be broken down by geographical location. But how can you jump to a particular location inside your long InDesign document? Well, of course, if you already know what page the section begins on, then it's easy. You just press command J or control J on Windows, and type in the number, that's go to page. But if you have no idea what page a particular heading or chapter is on, and you don't want to try and have to squint at those little thumbnails inside the pages panel to figure it out, well, in that case, you need sort of a InDesign document table of contents that you can keep open. Something that will let you navigate from one section to the next quickly, and fortunately, InDesign has just such a thing. It's the bookmarks panel, and you can find that by going to the Window menu, choosing Interactive, and then choosing Bookmarks. Now, ordinarily, people think of bookmarks as something that you use in a PDF file, but you can use InDesign's bookmarks as a navigation tool, even if you have just a straight print only publication. Let me show you how. First, I'll double click on page one inside the pages panel to jump to that page, and I'll zoom in to fit the page in window by pressing command zero or control zero on Windows. Now, to make a bookmark for this chapter opener here, all I need to do is select that text, and then click the new bookmark button at the bottom of the Bookmarks panel. You can see that the text I chose shows up as a bookmark inside the panel. So, it's really easy, but it would be really tedious if you had a lot of bookmarks to make, so instead, I like to have InDesign make all my bookmarks for me, quickly, with the table of contents feature. I'm going to delete this one by clicking off of it to deselect it, then selecting it again, and then clicking on this little trash can icon at the bottom of the panel. Yes, I want to delete that. So, to get InDesign to make the bookmarks for me, I just need to make sure that these chapter openers or section openers have their own paragraph style applied to them. I've already done that. So now, I just need to go to the Layout menu, and choose Table of Contents. In this case, I want all my chapter openers, so I'll choose Chapter title from the column on the right, click add to move it to the column on the left, and now, here's the trick: I need to make sure the Create PDF Bookmarks check box is turned on inside this dialog box. Now, in this case, I don't actually care how the table of contents looks, because I'm not going to be putting it on a real page. So I'm going to change the entry style to basic paragraph. Also, because in this document I actually have a real table of contents, on the document page, I'm going to make sure the Replace Existing Table of Contents is turned off. Otherwise, it will replace the one that's in my document. Once again, the table of contents that I'm making right now is not going to go inside my document. It's just a dummy, in order to create the bookmarks. So, I'll click OK, and InDesign quickly creates that table of contents and loads it up into the place icon. Now I can put this anywhere in my document I want, but in this case I'm going to put it out on my paste board, over here to the right side of my page. I'll simply click and drag, and it makes a text frame and places the table of contents into it. It's a little bit hard to see, so let's close the Pages panel and move my Bookmarks panel out of the way. Now, speaking of the Bookmarks panel, you'll see that not only did it make my table of contents inside that text frame, but it also populated my Bookmarks panel. All of those chapters that are inside the table of contents are also in the Bookmarks panel, and that is exactly what I wanted. And like I said, the Bookmarks panel lets you navigate to a certain page, so if I double click on Painting in Spain, it takes me right to that chapter. I'll double click Painting in France, and it takes me to that chapter. It's a great navigation tool. Also, let's say you want to go back to the last page you were looking at. You could try and find that inside the Bookmarks panel, but don't forget inside the Layout menu there's a feature called Go Back. Go Back is like a web browser; it goes back to the last page you were looking at. There it is, Painting in Spain. I can choose it again, and it goes back to chapter one. Go Back and Go Forward inside the Layout menu are really helpful for navigating around your document. Oh, there's one more thing that I should warn you about. Don't delete that table of contents out on the paste board, or else you'll lose all the bookmarks in the panel. Or, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe you want all your bookmarks to be deleted. So to do that, simply select that text frame out on the paste board with a section tool, delete it by hitting the delete key, and now, all the bookmarks are gone.

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