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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.
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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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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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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.