This guide will help you assemble a navigable PDF for various purposes, such as professional portfolios, promotion, and tenure. You may not need or use every tutorial here, but they should generally show you what's possible and can help you with specific parts of the project.
Design
Organization
Table of Contents. You can create a dedicated Table of Contents page or pages, that include just page numbers or are actively linked to your content. Unlike Bookmarks (see below), the Table of Contents is a page within your portfolio, wherein the items in the Table list are hyperlinked.
Bookmarks. PDFs can contain a table of contents or organization that exists separate of any page within the document. In Acrobat or Acrobat reader, this typically appears on the lefthand side when the Bookmarks tool is made visible. File names will appear as top-level headings. 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.
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.
PDF Files: the Basics
A PDF ("Portable Document Format") file offers a consistent format across PC or mobile devices that have a PDF reader. There are many free PDF readers but Adobe's own Acrobat Reader is probably the most popular. A PDF file is not designed to be easily or extensively edited; it's a published product, rather than a draft. Create your content in tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, or Drawings. Then, within Adobe Acrobat, you can add these together into a PDF file, and do final arrangement and organization, together with some minor edits, if needed.
Some PDF files are text, images, and graphics that are so indexed within the file that they can be extensively edited in Adobe Acrobat. Others are crude scans that consist of a single image - like a photocopy or photograph - of something that happens to be saved within a PDF file. With the latter, Adobe's tools may be able to do little or no editing, besides perhaps crude text overlay or annotations. What Acrobat can do with a scanned document depends on the quality and condition of the paper original, and the circumstances of it's scanning.
PDF files can be a combination of other files, that have either been amalgamated into a single PDF file, or simply stored and displayed together within a single PDF container. For simplicity's sake, this guide shows you how to create the former, and that's what is meant here by "portfolio."
Adobe Acrobat's "PDF Portfolio" tool allows you to create the latter, where your .docx, .jpg,, .pptx, and other file types keep those identities and remain independently editable. While practical for some uses, this creates a complicated file for your readers, wherein they must take special steps to view the included contents. So for many projects, Adobe's PDF Portfolio is not the best choice.
Creating PDF Files or Pages using Microsoft Word
https://www.youtube.com/embed/-yUS89t3Alg
Is it possible to enact this plan? Create a skeletal document using Microsoft Word, that includes a clickable TOC. The TOC only highlights pages where the faculty member will provide some sort of introductory page. So when you assemble the final portfolio, you put the scanned or otherwise collected documents in among these introductory pages, such that the clickable TOC is entirely built in Word, rather than having to fuss with it in Adobe. It's doable, and editable in Acrobat, because it appears that Acrobat converts the .docx internal links to PDF Document Links. But, two caveats:
Don't add page numbers in Word. Once you add the other content in between, they need to be updated anyway.
if you need to edit the resulting PDF it's a pain, because you would need to shift the links down, and create new ones in the TOC, which is complicated and not for the impatient.
Combining PDF Files
Combining files into a single PDF file
What file types will Adobe include in a .pdf?
Adding files to an existing PDF File.
Build the Bookmarks List
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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PDF Portfolio feature in Acrobat
In this mode Acrobat creates a PDF container that includes files in their original format. Thus, a .pptx file is still editable (and probably extractable) as .pptx. When viewed in Acrobat Reader, these files are still in their original format. This could cause complications for less patient readers, since A-Reader does not automatically preview these files. Adobe purports to include web pages, but in my test it handled https://www.canisius.edu/academics/office-academic-affairs/academic-institutes-and-centers/center-online-learning-innovation poorly.
In short, this is too complicated for most who might read a PDF portfolio, and would result in an untenable support burden for COLI.
Adding Page Numbers to a PDF
Is it possible to have Acrobat create the page numbers, and then after that, add the TOC? So that you get the entire document exactly the way you want it, and then as a last step add the TOC?
Creating a Table of Contents for a PDF Document
Create the Table of Contents using Microsoft Word
Creating a Clickable Table of Contents using Adobe Acrobat
Resources
https://helpx.adobe.com/support/acrobat.html