Inspiring

Question

Bookmark reports and character limits

Forum|Forum|17 days ago
July 27, 2026
7 replies
33 views

I use export bookmark report commands frequently. Acrobat DC Pro has always limited the bookmarks it exports to a certain number of characters—too few in most of my cases.

Is there a workaround available that would let me create a bookmark report that captures longer bookmarks?

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

What program is creating the PDF? Have you considered tagging the text with a unique paragraph style (or character style, depending on the software) and creating a separate TOC-like section to the PDF?

With the bookmarks being so long, I’m having a hard time imagining how useful they would be on a small screen. Plus the TOC-type method could be printed for extra reference.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

J

JIPNETAuthor

Inspiring

the PDFs are downloaded journal articles and online books or documents sent to me.

The bookmarks are not always useful in either pdf app, but they are useful for taking notes using the workflow I outlined. The bookmarks end up in a Word document where I revisit them. Shorter bookmarks help with navigation, true. But once I have notes in Word, I can locate pages and quotations quickly for secondary checks.

How can they be tagged? *unless you mean “set destination,” which I use. But tagging with par. style?

The TOC idea is interesting—probably not for this purpose but for others. (I often do make my bookmarks into TOCs; they are anchored to the page where they were made. I then bold them and color them to separate out the TOC from my own bookmarked notes.

D

DFWTechGuy

Participating Frequently

I don't think there's a setting to increase the bookmark character limit in Acrobat's bookmark report. If you're hitting that limit often, the only workaround I know of is using a script or a third-party tool that can read and export the full bookmark titles. Hopefully Adobe adds an option to remove or increase the limit in a future update.

Amal Jaiswal

Community Manager

Hi @JIPNET ,

Hope you are doing well, and thanks for reaching out.

The topics you've raised (bookmark reports and character limits) are ones we can definitely help with. We would need more information so that we can give you the most accurate troubleshooting steps

About your bookmark report:

Which version of Acrobat are you using? You can check by going to Help > About Adobe Acrobat and make sure it's updated to the latest version 26.001.21745 Planned update, Jul 23, 2026. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once
Are you trying to generate a report of all existing bookmarks in a PDF?
When you say "bookmark report," are you referring to the free Create Bookmark Report Action from the Actions Exchange, or a different method you've come across?
If you've already tried the Action, did it run without errors, or did it produce an empty/blank output? That distinction points to very different root causes.

About character limits:

Where are the bookmarks being created? Are they auto-generated from a Word document via PDFMaker, exported from InDesign, or typed manually inside Acrobat?
Are the bookmark names getting truncated (cut off mid-word), or are you hitting a limit when trying to type or paste a long name into the bookmark panel?
Is the PDF secured or password-protected in any way? You can check under File > Properties > Security.

Once you share those details, we can share more troubleshooting steps.

~Amal

J

JIPNETAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, create bookmark report. I think I am using a .sequ file to create the report. Truncation after X number of characters (typically less than the bookmark contains).

Not secured PDF. Bookmarks created with Acrobat. They are longer as bookmarks, but truncated with Create bookmark report.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Acrobat limits the characters to 512 (but supposedly has an internal limit of 751).

Is the 512 the limit or just in the report you want to create?

How are you creating the report?

I haven’t used them but check out these plugins:

https://www.traction-software.co.uk/pdfbookmarkprint/index.html

and

https://evermap.com/Tutorial_ABM_CreatingLinkReport.asp

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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