How to create PDFs with a left pane that has table of contents?

I like when PDF files have a pane that has the table of contents in it. How do you generate this? I don't know much about PDF file generation, but if I want to write a book in PDF format, I want there to be a TOC so the reader knows where they are in the book.

12.2k 23 23 gold badges 72 72 silver badges 90 90 bronze badges asked Dec 8, 2010 at 20:57 7,020 23 23 gold badges 66 66 silver badges 87 87 bronze badges

5 Answers 5

They're called "bookmarks". See your PDF tool's documentation for how to create them.

answered Dec 8, 2010 at 21:01 Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams 113k 11 11 gold badges 207 207 silver badges 250 250 bronze badges

First of all, one doesn't "write a book in PDF format." PDFs aren't generally made to be editable at that level. It can be done in theory, but practically you'll be creating your document in another program/format like Word, OpenOffice, TeX, DocBook, or HTML then converting it to PDF later.

The bookmarks and TOC are going to be dependent on the application that you write your document in, and how it gets converted to a PDF.

If your source document has a TOC that's linked to the destinations within the document and you use some sort of PDF export that knows how to use that information, then it can create a PDF with your TOC linked internally.

For example, if you use Word, and create a TOC in your doc that works, then use it's native Save As PDF feature (or Acrobat's PDF Maker, or PDF-T-Maker), then it will create all those bookmarks for you.

If you're using Notepad and PDFCreator to "Print to PDF", it's not going to work.

Other file types depend on how they get converted to PDF. Acrobat can take HTML pages (websites) and build the bookmarks.