The other day, I downloaded a PDF about the making of Revolver by The Beatles. It's more than 100 pages long, so it's unlikely I'm going to read through it in one sitting.
It dawned on me, while reading the book in Evince, that there's no bleeping way to set a bookmark in Evince. Usually, PDFs are short documents, a couple of pages. Lately, though, I've gotten a number of PDFs that are lengthy -- manuals for Virtuozzo, or full-blown PDF magazines for example -- and it's been a enormous pain when I need to close the PDF reader and come back to the document later, because there's no way to do something as simple as set a bookmark.
I checked Evince, xpdf, KPDF, and Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Linux -- not a single one has a way for the user to create a bookmark. (Unless it's a hidden function or well-buried, in which case I'm sure I'll be hearing about it shortly after saving this post...) Acrobat Reader supports bookmarks when the PDF is created, so a publisher can set bookmarks, but I couldn't find any way for the user to set a bookmark.
And people wonder why ebooks aren't all the rage? I found a really cool site with free downloads of classic literature as PDFs. I'd consider actually using these if I could actually save my place between sessions. I'm probably not going to finish Crime and Punishment in one sitting.
So, I'm curious -- does anyone know why such an obvious feature has been overlooked so thoroughly? Is this seemingly simple feature just amazingly difficult to implement for some reason, or what?
I can see why Adobe hasn't implemented the feature -- they save it for the full, paid version of Acrobat. This is a mistake, I think, on their part -- they'd increase adoption of PDF ebooks if readers could actually set bookmarks. But I can't think of any reason why the Evince, KPDF, or xpdf developers haven't added bookmarks. It shouldn't be necessary to save bookmarks to the PDF itself, they could simply create bookmark file under the config directory for the program and save bookmarks to that.
14 Comments
AFAIK, evince has a nifty feature: when you open a document, it takes you to the place you were when you closed it...
But I presume that is not what you're looking for...
It's helpful, but not quite what I want - I'd like to be able to explicitly set a bookmark on any given page. For example, the Virtuozzo manuals have several sections I'd like to bookmark.
It is most certainly not impossible, e.g. Apple's Preview.app supports it. But it certainly should be more widespread.
Have you filed a bug or feature request?
No kidding! I have spent hours looking for something like this. I am in graduate school, and this is frequently a problem when I am doing my research. I really have no use for printing out thousands of pages of articles and reports, as it is costly and takes up way too much space. Like you, I am looking for a way to bookmark pages or specific spots in articles. I also would like to have the ability to take notes that link to that portion of the writing. Users can write comments using Adobe reader, but only if the document's publisher has set up that feature. Considering that most journals and research organizations are publishing their documents electronically, it would seem like someone would have already developed something like this.
Someone is working on this for their GNOME Summer of Code project in Evince:
http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Annotations
Hi,
it is beyond my comprehension too why user defined bookmarks are
not implemented in adobe reader. But luckily I have just found this
one:
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2358
If you manage to find the directory where to store the javascript
and how to cause it to be loaded then I think this is what you want.
In adobe reader 7 if you edit, preferences, startup, and set "reopen documents to last viewed page" to "all documents" your pdfs will reopen where you left off.
I am sure it isn't as nifty as being able to set multiple bookmarks but generally this is all I need when I am reading something. IT doesn't alter the pdf, the info of where you left off is contained somewhere else on your hard drive. So if you take the pdf to another computer you will have to find your place again.
I haven't tried the java bookmarks above or anything so that may be better.
I must say that I wish adobe made the feature I just outlined more obvious in the menus.
It makes it much more enjoyable for me to pick up where I left off.
I had the same issue recently. I googled but didn't find any satisfactory solution.
FWIW, I managed to create pdf bookmarks using pdflatex with hyperref and pdfpages. ( A bit of a hack but hey...)
An empty latex file can be created as follows.
\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage[bookmarks]{hyperref}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=1-9]{filename.pdf}
\pdfbookmark[1]{NameOfBookmark}{label1}
\includepdf[pages=10-last]{filename.pdf}
\end{document}
The above code should create a toplevel bookmark for page 10.
here is the adobe acrobat cs3 way of storing the view settings till next time the document is opened.
edit->preferences->Documents->select the "Restore last view setting when reopening documents" radio button->select 10 in the "documents in the recently used list" drop down menu.
well i wish that was easier and came by default.
This is a huge problem and the fact that there is not even one program with proper bookmarking ability is shocking.
http://flavianopetrocchi.blogspot.com/ offers a nifty little application which, while annoying to use, is very useful for bookmarking.
Not a complete solution, but KPDF does support bookmarks. Check here:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3095580.0
I've used okular (kde4 viewer) a couple of times too, it support bookmarks as well.
Okular can set bookmarks.
@matthew: okular sure can, but if you cut and paste the file somewhere else, ur bokmark does not shows up there, seems okular stores not relative to document but something in its own database !