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This guide will help you assemble a set of different documents into a single, navigable PDF. Examples of this might include professional portfolios or custom reading packets for students. This page walks you through the basics, with various navigation options included. Choose the option or options which best suit you and your readers' purposes.
For this project you will need Adobe Acrobat, that's part of the Creative Cloud suite available to Canisius College faculty and staff. Acrobat is not a creator toolset, but rather software that allows you to compile, organize, and publish a PDF file that is itself a collection of content created in other file types. Even Adobe does not suggest that you create content in Adobe Acrobat.
So you'll re adding content that you create into your PDF you also need a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, or Google Docs. The files you wish to compile into a single PDF might be generated with various apps, such as AutoCAD, Excel, Google Drawings, or Canva, and they might be in formats such as .xlsx, .jpg, or Google Slides. And you may include files that are in PDF format already, within your bigger PDF. These may be files that were always digital, having been saved as PDFs in creation software (such as Word or Google Docs.) Or , they can be scans of paper documents, that are essentially images saved in PDF format. Adobe Acrobat can combine all of these into a single, navigable PDF document readable by anyone with a PDF reader application.
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In Acrobat, to add files to a new PDF file, click Tools and choose "Combine Files. If you then click "Add Files," you'll see an Explorer or Finder window, but you can also just drag and drop files into this webpage to upload them.
It may take several seconds or even minutes for Adobe to generate thumbnail images of your files on the following page. Once this is done, you can quickly rearrange the order of the files by dragging and dropping. You can also do this later on, but it's quicker to do it now.
Once you are satisfied with their order, click "Combine," and Adobe will generate a single PDF file using these documents.
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Once you have files assembled into a PDF file, you can rearrange them in several ways. Click the "Organize Pages" icon on the right toolbar. (Or, click Tools → Organize Pages.)
Adding Another File
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To add a file to a PDF, on the Organize Pages screen, click Insert at the top, and choose "From File..."
You can then find and add the file or files from your Hard Drive.
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Rotate pages by clicking on the page to highlight it. A small menu appears; click the circle-arrow icons to rotate the page image in either direction.
Organization via Bookmarks and Thumbnails
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By default, Adobe creates a bookmarks list based on information that came in with the files. The separate file names appear as top-level or leftmost entries. With .docx files, headings will appear in their proper order and levels, but pages are not recognized. With .pptx files, slides are listed. The links to file names, headings, and slides in the Bookmarks list are rearrangeable, but this does not change their order, or any other content, within the files. It can save time to just rely on this bookmark list, and dispense with the Table of Contents above, but this list may not be available if your readers elect to print out your PDF. In most cases Acrobat will auto-generate a set of bookmarks when you combine the files. File names will be the major headings, but there may be additional sub-headings, for example generated from the headings within the files, or individual slides in a slidedeck.
If you right-click on a bookmark, you get a variety of different options, including to delete or change it's destination (where it goes when a reader clicks it.) Probably most useful is "rename," since you may want more descriptive headings than your file names.
You can also manually add bookmarks:
Within your text, Put your cursor on the line to which you want the bookmark to go. Then click the "New Bookmark" button at the top of the Bookmarks list. |
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Acrobat will create the Bookmark with the name "Untitled." Rename it accordingly. You can then drag it up or down the list, to put it where it properly belongs, in case it didn't install exactly where it should be. |
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Thumbnails
PDFs can contain a set of small "thumbnail" images of each page that together form a quick-navigation tool. In Acrobat or Acrobat reader, this typically appears on the lefthand side when the Page Thumbnails tool is made visible. This tool is probably less valuable for the reader, since the author can better recognize pages represented by the thumbnails, and only pages, rather than headings, are navigation choices here.
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If you plan to add front matter to your document that is not paginated, you may wish to wait until that's done before creating page numbers.
Table of Contents
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After you've arranged your PDF file the way you want it, if you'd like to add a Table of Contents, there's several possible ways to do this. Two are:
Create the Table of Contents page or pages in MS Word, install it into Acrobat, and then use Acrobat's tools to create the links between Table entries and the actual pages of content.
Create a set of pages in an MS Word file that are section headings or starters. Then, use MS Word's Table of Contents feature to auto-build the Table of Contents, which are links to each of the section pages. Add this file to your PDF file. Lastly, move the section pages to their appropriate places in the document, so that the Table of Contents created in Word helps readers navigate to the different parts of your PDF file. This second option is best when you need to compose opening remarks for each section of your file.
Compress Your File
Large PDF files, especially if they contain various kinds of data - images, graphs, charts, scanned documents, and so on - can be very large. A page of text can be 100 - 120 kb in a PDF, and many people's default smartphone camera settings can produce images in the 1.5 - 4 mb range. You should take steps to reduce the sizes of these documents or images before incorporating them into a PDF. But even after you've done that and compiled the PDF, Adobe Acrobat Pro has a compression tool that can reduce the final file size still further. Importantly, Acrobat's success in compressing a file depends on its contents; some PDFs may reduce in size dramatically, others less so.
Video Tutorial: Compress a PDF in Acrobat Pro
With the PDF open in Acrobat Pro, on the lefthand side tool menu, choose Compress a PDF. Choose Single File.
In follow-on dialogs, Acrobat asks you to choose a folder, and create a file name. Then click Save, and you should have a compressed copy of your PDF.
If you are importing lots of potential text and images directly via a .docx (MS Word) file, you can perform compression on the images using Word's tool, before bringing the Word file into your PDF.