The Navigation pane to the left of the Document pane contains four Tab palettes in Adobe Reader 6:
The Bookmarks palette:Shows the overall structure of the document in an outline form. Note, however, that not all PDF files that you open in Adobe Reader have bookmarks because this is a feature that the author of the document must decide to include prior to or when actually making the PDF file. (See Chapter 4 for more on this topic.)
The Signatures palette:Displays your digital signature or any others that exist in a PDF document signature form field. (See Chapter 11 for more info on signing and securing PDF documents.)
The Layers palette:Enables you to view any content layers that the author has inserted, such as headers and footers or watermarks, in the current PDF document. (For more on this new feature, see Chapter 10.) The Pages palette (formerly the Thumbnails palette):Shows little rep-resentations of each page in the PDF document you’re viewing. Note that Adobe Reader generates thumbnails for each page in a PDF document, whether or not the author embedded them at the time when the PDF was made.
Adobe Reader offers you several ways to open and close the Navigation pane (which may or may not be displayed automatically when you first open the PDF file for viewing):
If the Navigation Pane is closed, click any of the Navigation Tabs on the left side of the document pane to open the Navigation Pane and display that palette.
If the Navigation Pane is open, you can close it by clicking the Close button (X) on the Options bar at the top of the pane.
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Click the Navigation Pane button (the double-headed arrow) at the beginning of the status bar in the Document pane to open or close the Navigation Pane.
Press F6 (Windows or Mac).
Note that you can manually resize the Navigation pane to make it wider or nar-rower. Position the Hand tool mouse pointer on its border or on the Navigation Pane button at the beginning of the Status bar. When the tool changes to a double-headed arrow, drag right (to make the pane wider) or left (to narrow it).
Adobe Reader remembers any width changes that you make to the Navigation pane, so that the pane resumes the last modified size each time you use the Reader.
You might be tempted to increase the width of the Navigation pane because it isn’t wide enough to display all the text in the headings in the Bookmarks palette. Rather than reduce the precious real estate allotted to the Document pane in order to make all the headings visible, you can read a long heading by hovering the Hand tool mouse pointer over its text. After a second or two, Acrobat displays the entire bookmark heading in a highlighted box that appears on top of the Navigation pane and extends as far as necessary into the Document pane. As soon as you click the bookmark link or move the Hand tool off the bookmark, this highlighted box disappears. You can also choose Wrap Long Bookmarks on the Options menu at the top of the Bookmarks pane which automatically adjusts the width of bookmark text to the current width of the Navigation pane.
Using the Bookmarks palette
The Bookmarks palette gives you an overview of the various sections in many PDF documents (see Figure 2-5). Adobe Reader indicates the section of the document that is currently being displayed in the Document pane by highlight-ing the page icon of the correspondhighlight-ing bookmark in the Bookmarks palette.
In some documents you open, the Bookmarks palette will have multiple nested levels (indicating subordinate levels in the document’s structure or table of contents). When a Bookmarks palette contains multiple levels, you can expand a part of the outline to display a heading’s nested levels by click-ing the Expand button that appears in front of its name. In Windows, Expand buttons appear as boxes containing a plus sign. On the Macintosh, Expand buttons appear as shaded triangles pointing to the right. Note that you can also expand the current bookmark by clicking the Expand Current Bookmark button at the top of the Bookmark palette.
When you expand a particular bookmark heading, all its subordinate topics appear in an indented list in the Bookmarks palette, and the Expand button becomes a Collapse button (indicated by a box with a minus sign in it in Windows and by a downward-pointing shaded triangle on the Mac). To hide the subordinate topics and tighten up the bookmark list, click the topic’s Collapse button. You can also collapse all open subordinate topics by select-ing Collapse Top-Level Bookmarks on the Options menu.
Using the Pages palette
The Pages palette shows you tiny versions of each page in the PDF document you’re viewing in Adobe Reader (see Figure 2-6). You can use the Navigation pane’s vertical scroll bar to scroll through these thumbnails to get an overview of the pages in the current document, and sometimes you can even use them to locate the particular page to which you want to go (especially if that page contains a large, distinguishing graphic).
Expand Current Bookmark Options menu
Figure 2-5:
The Navigation pane opened with the Bookmarks palette selected.
Note that Adobe Reader displays the number of each page immediately beneath its thumbnail image in the Pages palette. The program indicates the current page that you’re viewing by highlighting its page number underneath the thumbnail. The program also indicates how much of the current page is being displayed in the Document pane on the right with the use of a red out-lining box in the current thumbnail (this box appears as just two red lines when the box is stretched as wide as the thumbnail).
You can zoom in and out and scroll up and down through the text of the cur-rent page by manipulating the size and position of this red box. To scroll the current page’s text up, position the Hand tool on the bottom edge of the box and then drag it downward (and, of course, to scroll the current page’s text down, you drag this outline up). To zoom in on the text of the page in the Document pane, position the Hand tool on the sizing handle located in the lower-right corner of the red box (causing it to change to a double-headed diagonal arrow) and then drag the corners of the box to make the box smaller so that less is selected. To zoom out on the page, drag the corner to make the box wider and taller. Of course, if you stretch the outline of the red box so that it’s as tall and wide as the thumbnail of the current page, Adobe Reader responds by displaying the entire page in the Document pane, the same as if you selected the Fit in Window view.
Figure 2-6:
The Navigation pane opened with the Pages palette selected.
By default, Adobe Reader displays what it considers to be large thumbnails (large enough that they must be shown in a single column within the Pages palette). To display more thumbnails in the Pages palette, choose Reduce Page Thumbnails on the Options menu at the top of the Pages palette. When you select this command, the displayed thumbnails are reduced in 33% incre-ments. This means that if you want to reduce the thumbnail display substan-tially, you have to repeatedly select the Reduce Page Thumbnails command.
To increase the size of the thumbnails, choose Enlarge Page Thumbnails on the Options menu.
Using the Article palette
Acrobat 6 supports a feature called articlesthat enables the author or editor to control the reading order when the PDF document is read online. This fea-ture is useful when reading text that has been set in columns, as are many magazine and newspaper articles, because it enables you to read the text as it goes across columns and pages as though it were set as one continuous column. Otherwise, you end up having to do a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling, and you can easily lose your place.
To see if the PDF file you’re reading has any articles defined for it, choose View➪Navigation Tabs➪Articles. Doing this opens a floating Articles palette in its own dialog box that lists the names of all the articles defined for the document. If this dialog box is empty, then you know that the PDF document doesn’t use articles. Note that you can dock this palette on the Navigation pane and add its tab beneath the one for the Pages palette by dragging the Articles tab displayed in the dialog box and dropping it on the Navigation pane.
To read an article listed on the Articles tab, double-click the article name in the list or click its name in the list and then click the Read Article item on its pop-up menu. The first part of the text defined in the article appears in fit-width viewing mode at the Adobe Reader ‘s default maximum-fit setting, and the mouse pointer changes to a Hand tool with a down arrow on it. After read-ing the first section of the article, you continue to the next section either by pressing the Enter key (Return on Mac) or by clicking the Hand tool pointer.
Adobe Reader indicates when you reach the end of the article by placing a horizontal bar under the arrowhead of the down arrow on the Hand tool. If you then click the Hand tool again or press Enter (or Return), Adobe Reader returns you to the start of the article (indicated by a horizontal bar appearing at the top of the shaft of the down arrow). To return to normal viewing mode after reading an article, click one of the regular viewing buttons on the Zoom toolbar — Actual Size, Fit in Window, or Fit Width — or its corresponding menu option on the View menu (you can even use the View➪Fit Visible com-mand, which resizes the text and graphics in the document — without page borders — and has no comparable button).
To change the magnification used in reading an article in a PDF file, before you start reading the article, choose Edit➪Preferences or press Ctrl+K (Ô+K on the Mac). In the Preferences dialog box that appears, click Page Display in the left window, and then select a new magnification setting from the Max Fit Visible Zoom drop-down list. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog box and change the magnification.