Name It
Name It is an Acrobat plug-in which makes the creation of PDF named destinations easy with a simple user interface. You can create them one at a time, or in batch from bookmarks, pages, and in more advanced ways.
Named destinations enable your PDF documents to be navigated more easily on the Web and are also ideal for on-line manuals and help documentation, particularly if regular updates occur. This is because named destinations act as anchors within a PDF, so that you can link to a specific page view.
What is a named destination?
A named destination is a destination view of part (or all) of a particular page of a PDF document. This specific view is stored within the PDF with an associated name.
Named destinations thus enable a user to name a view on a page of a document with a text name such as introduction, in a similar way to a bookmark referring to a particular view. But, these named destinations can then be set to be the destinations of links or bookmarks when Name It is installed.
If you use named destinations for inter-document links then it will not matter if documents are updated as long as they include all the required named destinations. This makes updates much simpler as links in existing documents do not need to be changed because they use the names rather than specific page numbers and views.
Note: Name It is only required to create and manipulate the named destinations. Once the PDFs are complete, they can be distributed to anyone, regardless of whether or not they have Name It.
How Name It Works
Name It makes it easy to create multiple named destinations in one go. With one button click you can create named destinations for all the bookmarks in a PDF file, for each page, or apply them to multiple files in batch mode! So, if you have to re-create a PDF, you can easily re-create the named destinations too.
The Name It menu provides one-click access to the main functions. There is also a Name It Control Panel to view the named destinations in the document and perform more advanced functions.
Why Use Named Destinations?
The real benefit of using named destinations is when you are using PDF documents in conjunction with the World-Wide Web or on-line help systems. Normally if you link to a PDF document (and you are using Acrobat within your Web browser) you will see the first page. However, if you have named destinations in the document and you link to a URL like doc.pdf#introduction the browser will open the PDF at the named destination called introduction — wherever it is in the document.
Main Features
- Create named destinations by bookmark (destinations have the same names as the bookmarks)
- Create by page (destinations have the names Page1, Page2, ...)
You can opt to use the page label as the name of the destination (the ‘logical number’ shown under thumbnail image of a page when viewing the Pages panel in Acrobat) - Create destinations for links (i.e. for each link that goes to a view in the same or another PDF, within a folder of PDF documents, create a named destination for that view and change the link to point to the new destination)
- Create in batch
- Edit and rename existing named destinations
- Full import and export facility for a single PDF or entire folder
- Export bookmark-related named destinations
- Create links to named destinations
- Remove all destinations (e.g. to clean up before creating new ones)
Name It also provides a mechanism for converting links which use named destinations to normal Acrobat links. This may sound bizarre, but has proved to be very useful for some systems where people are merging multiple PDF documents containing named destinations, which happen to use the same names in different documents.