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Question

Set PDF file so that is opens without showing the bookmarks panel.

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
February 12, 2025
2 replies
2274 views

I'm using Acrobat Pro 2024.005.20399.

Despite having set Document Properties > Initial View > Navigation Tab to "Page Only", my PDFs are still showing the bookmarks panel when they open. I want them to open with the Bookmarks Panel hidden.

Theses PDFs consist of a single page and have no bookmarks in them.

To make them come up without the Bookmarks Panel showing, I've had to add an Action to the page:

Select Trigger = "Page Open"

Select Action = "Execute a menu item"

And the menu item I've selected is "Acrobat Menu>View>Show/Hide>Side panels>Bookmarks

When I do these things, the pdfs finally come up without the Bookmarks Panel showing.

So, I can get it to work, but I thought that merely setting the Navigation Tab to "Page Only" would be sufficient to work on its own.

What's going on? Am I misunderstanding something?

I'm attaching screen shots of my document and page settings.

try67

Community Expert

It should be enough, yes. Where (in which application and OS) did you test it when it showed up incorrectly?

harleygnuyaAuthor

Known Participant

Acrobat Pro 2024.005.20399

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit Build 19045.4291

try67

Community Expert

That's what I figured they should be doing. Thanks for verifying it.

So, I tried removing the action on page open, and created the script you provided above. Even that did not fix it on my PC, where it still opens up with the Bookmarks pane showing. It works on my laptop, though.

Just to verify that the script was running, I put an app.alert call just before the this.pane assignment and another following it and discovered that (refer to my attachments) in Step 1, the "Before" messasge is displayed and the bookmarks pane doesn't show, in Step 2 we see the "After" message, which means the assignment has executed, and we see that we now have a Bookmarks pane showing and the page has not yet rendered. Finally, in Step 3 we see that the page is rendered and the Bookmarks pane is visible. This is on my PC (Acrobat Pro), it runs fine on the laptop (Acrobat Reader).

I've also attached a copy of the pdf file that produced the above results.

Since every pdf I have tried ran as I would have expected it to on my laptop, and every one I tried on my PC produced the exact opposite result, I'm pretty well convinced that there's something on my PC or in my Acrobat Pro preferences that is causing this to happen. Do you have any idea what that might be?

Not really. Even if there was such a setting (I'm not familiar with one) then the script should have overridden it.

Try moving the code to the first page's Page Open action. Since that is executed after the file is opened and rendered, it might work better, actually.

harleygnuyaAuthor

Known Participant

Oops! I attached the wrong page properties screenshot. Here's the right one.

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