Bookends User Guide: PDF bookmarks for table of contents?

[cboulanger]

Hello Jon,

I find myself using the Bookends User Guide much more recently, exploring the possibilities of the REGEX search and the features of the Bookends server. However, I find navigation inside the user guide a bit cumbersome - I have to scroll back to the table of contents often to then jump to a particular heading. Would it be a lot of hassle for you to generate a table of contents in the PDF itself, using PDF bookmarks? Then one could have always the table of contents open in the PDF reader and jump between headings much more conveniently. I don't know wether your PDF-generating software can do that...

Thanks!

[w.yaqoob]

on that note, for anyone who's been looking for an easy way of generating ToC entries without having to splash out on Adobe Acrobat Pro, I've been using this: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37436/pdfoutliner

[Jon]

The User Guide is created in Pages and exported as a PDF. I'll take a look at PDFOutliner. But one question -- the User Guide is updated very frequently (with every release, so anywhere from 3-6 weeks). Does the TOC need to be recreated each time? If so, that's not practical...

Jon
Sonny Software

[w.yaqoob]

I created a test version of the User Guide using a 28% detail level in PDFOutline (100% creates hundreds of entries). It's missing a few headings but otherwise works pretty well. Takes less than a minute, and you could run it on each new version of the guide. The only problem might be each time having to add in a few entries that are omitted. e.g. appendix B. Alternatively those problems could perhaps be remedied by slightly altering the formatting or font size of those particular headings prior to pdfing...

Here's the sample version of the user guide I made: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2844601/Book ... 0Guide.pdf

[w.yaqoob]

Further to that, it would be brilliant (if at all possible) for Bookends to display ToC entries in the pdf preview pane, makes navigating large pdfs much much easier...

[Jon]

Thanks for the example. As for a TOC for pdf preview -- you mean in Bookends? Like the Adobe pdf plugin does (but which is incompatible with Bookends and causes all sorts of bad behavior)?

Jon
Sonny Software

[cboulanger]

Here's a suggestion from a google search:

OpenOffice Writer: A hassle, but it's the only free option I've seen. You'd export your Pages file as Word or rtf and then open it in OpenOffice Writer and then export to PDF; it will generate a PDF table of contents as part of the export.
(from http://apple.stackexchange.com/question ... s-document)

However, I don't know how much this would mess up your pages document, so I don't know if this is really practical.

[w.yaqoob]

Jon, I didn't know the Adobe plugin did that when it was used. ToC is obviously not enough to make up for its other defects. I was hoping there was some method that would still use PDFkit, but I realise this may be more trouble than its worth...