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August 7, 2017
Question

InDesign PDF bookmarks to named destinations

  • August 7, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1483 views

Earlier this year I wrote a plugin to automatically convert all the bookmarks in a pdf file to named destinations.  This is because the project I work on had a pdf help file and the automatic named destinations created by InDesign add a bunch of random numbers to the named destination names; I need these to be stable so that I can consistently call the same named destination to launch to the appropriate section of the help manual.  So as a workaround, I wrote this plug in so that the named destination names match the bookmark names and are unchanging.

Anyhow, the plug in works great on pdfs I create in MS word or find randomly on the web, but when I try to run it on a pdf file exported from adobe InDesign (our help file is created using InDesign), it fails.  The named destinations are created, but they don't list a page number and hence don't actually work.  Are there any settings in InDesign I need to change or is there something I might be doing incorrectly when I export the project to a pdf that may be causing this issue?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Srishti_Bali
Legend
August 7, 2017

Moving to InDesign Scripting

Regards

Srishti

Steve Werner
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 7, 2017

The main InDesign forum is intended for general InDesign users—people who want to know how to use the application.

We have a couple subforums for people who have more technical questions (like yours).

For developers (which sounds like you, if you've developed a plug-in):

InDesign SDK

For scripters (who may have some information about InDesign's insides from developing scripts:

InDesign Scripting

August 8, 2017

Hi.  Sorry, I guess I should have been more specific.  I wrote the plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Pro, to be used after a help file created in InDesign had already been exported to pdf.  The plug-in works on pdfs created in other applications, but is failing on the help file I wrote it for.  So that said, my question is related to InDesign general user.  My question is whether or not there is some kind of setting or property or something I could be doing prior to exporting the pdf that might fix my problem.  Thanks!