Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have a large document with many headings and subheadings. When I export to PDF, all those headings turn into bookmarks, which is great. However, they always start out "open," which means that the bookmarks list in Acrobat is five times longer than the bookmark pane. I don't have Acrobat Pro--it's far outside my price range for software--so I can't just edit the PDF manually.

Is there a way to force the bookmarks to export "closed" instead of "open"?

Is there any other workaround you can think of that will achieve the same effect?

See the options in File/Export As PDF, Links tab.

Yeah, that's where I've been looking. The options I see are:

"Export bookmarks as named destinations."
"Convert document references to PDF targets."
"Export URLs relative to file system."
"Cross-Document Links: Default Mode, Open with PDF reader application, Open with Internet browser."

Does one of those handle open/closed bookmarks? None of the names would seem to suggest that, but I don't entirely understand all of them.

The setting you're looking for is on the Initial view tab of the pdf export dialog. Set Panes to Page only.

Note that not all software will respect this setting. Foxit reader 2.2 does not, while Adobe reader 9.2 does. I'm not at the Mac right now, so I can't check how Preview behaves (my guess is that it disregards this setting, and keeps the state from when it was previously open...). If needed, you can download Adobe reader for Mac OS-X from Adobe's web pages.

No, that's not what I mean. In the bookmark menu, if you have sub-headings they appear indented, yes? If you click on a heading, its sub-headings appear and disappear. When I export a PDF, the file automatically has all the sub-headings visible. I'd like the bookmark tree to just show all the Heading 1's, which are my chapter titles. Does that make sense now? Is there a way to create that behaviour when I open the file? This is a big, reference book that I give to other people, so I'd like them to just see the chapter titles when they first open it.

If you cannot find a solution, Orion, you could restructure your bookmarks as follows:

Set up a Table of Contents displaying Chapter Headings only. Clicking on a Chapter would then take you to a page where the subheadings for that chapter were displayed. These subheadings in turn would point to the appropriate place in the document. At the bottom of each of these subpages you might put a Return to Main Contents link for easy navigation.

TheRealOrion wrote:... Is there a way to force the bookmarks to export "closed" instead of "open"?
Is there any other workaround you can think of that will achieve the same effect?

At least the free Reader doesn't support this afaik.
What you can do is to script the reader from outside to close the Bookmarks up to a certain level on open. If you want to deliver the behavior to other people reading your documents, you'd have to give them the script as well.

For those who are interested, I found the way to do this! I knew there was a toggle somewhere. It just took me a long time to find it.

If you go through "File" and "Export as PDF..." you get a window with several tabs of options. Under the "User Interface" tab, the last option at the bottom is "Visible Bookmark Levels" and it has a counter next to it. Set that to "1," and the only bookmarks that will be "visible" when you open the file are the ones at level one.

Voila.

You CANNOT (i repeat) CANNOT have underscores (_) in the tags/bookmarks if named destinations!!!!