Creating a PDF outline

[Randolph]

(Second, hopefully more clueful version.)

Continuing in my "put out a new PDF version of this big thick book" project, I have gotten the fonts all licensed and cleaned up, found and fixed out-of-date links, and I'm about ready to make a releasable PDF of this thing.

So.

I want to create a PDF outline for the document. Apparently, there is some support for this with automatically generated tables of contents, but the book already has a table of contents, and it would be a huge amount of work to recreate it. Is there any way I can manually generate an outline?

[Lee D]

You have the option of creating a TOC based off a text style used within the document, this would be separate to the one the document already has.

[BeccaT]

Hi, I've been able to automatically generate a TOC, which I understood would also create a PDF outline in the exported document. For the set-up, I have ticked 'include as PDF bookmark' and exported it as a high quality digital pdf. Is there something else I should check? The TOC is interactive which I'm really pleased about, but the left hand view on the pdf is of each page, and I understood that the outline would be a list of the table of contents.

I hope you can help, thank you!

[Old Bruce]

42 minutes ago, BeccaT said:

but the left hand view on the pdf is of each page, and I understood that the outline would be a list of the table of contents.

You should see if your PDF viewer has the ability to show the ToC or Bookmarks. This sounds like it is set to show Thumbnails.

[Randolph]

What Old Bruce said - check to make sure your PDF reader is showing you the document outline, not the thumbnails.

For the sake of clarification, if anyone cares, thumbnails, the document outline, and bookmarks are all PDF navigation methods. Confusingly, document outline entries are sometimes called "bookmarks," but they are actually two different things.