Adding Reader-Friendly Touches to PDFs, Part 2

How To: Pariah Burke concludes his two-part series on perfecting your PDFs. Learn how to use mixed page sizes, apply destinations, use the article tool, and insert headers and footers.

In part one of "Add Reader-Friendly Touches to Your PDFs," I suggested a few ways to increase the readability of your PDFs, and thus the likelihood that they will be read. Here are a few more.

Articles

What Acrobat refers to as an article is what layout artists call a story, thread, or text flow—the complete flow of copy and related imagery independent of page layout and structure. As devices such as PDAs, cell phones, itty-bitty laptops, and visually assistive devices are employed for online reading in greater numbers, the likelihood of most PDFs being read diminishes.

Why? Because most PDFs are fixed-width, which presents the user with an unsavory choice between two major usability barriers: zoom out to read tiny lines of text, or read each line at a comfortable size by scrolling horizontally in a typewriter-like fashion. Multiple column layouts make PDFs even more difficult for such devices, and thus, less likely to be read.

Make your content-driven PDFs readable everywhere by specifying the flow of content independent of the layout. Using the Article Tool (Tools > Advanced Editing > Article Tool), drag a tight rectangle around each column or passage of text (and any visuals integral to interpretation of that text). Once created, right-click on the article area to set at least the article title and subject to identify it among other articles in the document. When the PDF as you've designed it cannot be rendered comfortably, PDF viewers will fall back to present the content in an adaptive article-centric layout.

Detail Destinations

Zoom in on important details of illustrations, diagrams, charts, and spreadsheets, then bookmark those views. When your narrative discusses columns A-G of a 75 column spreadsheet, for instance, zoom to show just columns A-G and bookmark that view. Then insert a hyperlink to that view in the text supporting the data. And, within that exhibit view, include a hyperlink "return" button to jump the reader back to the text. Such links will dramatically enhance reader comprehension of your material.

To create or change custom view settings of a bookmark, right-click on the bookmark and choose Properties. In the Bookmark Properties's Actions tab, select the "Go to a page in this document" action, and delete it. Then add a new "Go to a page view" action from the list above, which will then allow you to move around in, and zoom in and out on, the document to find the precise view desired. Alternatively, you can setup "destinations," or specific document views, in advance, then set bookmarks to those destinations.

Headers and Footers

Acrobat 6 and later includes the ability to add headers and footers, including page numbers, onto pages. Typically these items are created in the layout or word processor application, but that becomes impossible with PDFs compiled from multiple documents. To add them into your PDF, select the appropriately named Add Headers & Footers command from the Document menu.

People are trained to look to the corners (and bottom center) of pages for page numbers; few notice the page number field in the PDF viewer's interface, which becomes entirely irrelevant when the document is printed. Help your readers understand what they're looking at as well what page they're on by inserting headers, footers, and/or page numbers. You can even optionally alternate the location of the information, swapping them from left to right for odd and even pages, for example.

Mixed Page Sizes

If your PDF contains multiple page sizes, PDF viewers will typically zoom variable view settings like Actual Size, Fit Page, and Fit Width to accommodate the largest page in the document. If the bulk of your document is 8.5 x 11" with a single 17 x 11" diagram, then the PDF viewer will, upon opening the PDF, zoom the first page down to a size too small for comfortable reading.

Avoiding this is easy: just set the initial view magnification in the Document Properties dialog to "Fit Visible." The Fit Visible view setting may crop the edges of the page itself, but the content will be entirely within view.

Page Thumbnails

In the majority of PDFs, document thumbnails serve no purpose other than to increase file size. However, in visually-rich PDFs like product catalogs, chart-laden reports, technical manuals, and so forth, they can be extremely helpful.

In addition to including hyperlinks to charts and other specific imagery in bookmarks and the TOC, consider including page thumbnails and setting the document initial view to display the Pages panel. Thumbnails will do nothing for documents containing only text or small illustrations, but they're a remarkably useful device in helpings readers find their way to—or back to—specific large imagery.

There are other ways to extend and enhance the usability of your PDFs, of course: There's tagging, page transitions (under the right circumstances), and watermarks, to name a few. Adding the usability enhancements discussed in this article, however, will go a long, long way toward making your PDFs more reader friendly, and thus, more likely to be read. And, they should be read, no matter what Jakob Nielson would have you believe.