Making Text Anchors the Fast Way

Here’s a trick involving making text anchors in InDesign that Anne-Marie pointed out to me in a recent podcast. Like so many great tips, it’s painfully simple (in the way of, “how could I have overlooked that?!”) and makes life much better once you know it.

As I’ve pointed out in various places (including my 10 things you need to know about Interactive PDF title at lynda.com), you cannot make a navigation button that takes you to directly to a specific page… like “go to page 13.” Acrobat, for whatever reason, can’t deal with such clear communication. (This does work if you’re exporting to SWF, by the way; just not PDF.) So instead you have to first create a text anchor, then navigate to that.

Unfortunately, the path to making a text anchor is not a happy carefree one. First of all, you need to find the New Hyperlink Destination feature in the Hyperlinks panel flyout menu, then… well, believe me, it’s a pain in the neck.

So, imagine my surprise when Anne-Marie started talking about the little anchor icon in the Bookmarks panel. I had never seen that icon there because I had never made a bookmark with text selected! But if you do select text before creating a new bookmark (by clicking the New Bookmark button in that panel), you get a bookmark and a text anchor. It’s so easy! InDesign even highlights the bookmark name so you can rename it:

Once you have the anchor in the Bookmarks panel, you can point to it from the Buttons panel:

I love the speed and ease of this method of creating text anchors. There is only one problem that I can think of: The anchors show up in the Bookmarks pane in Acrobat (if someone opens that pane there). The solution: Leave the Bookmarks checkbox off in the export PDF dialog box. You still get the anchors, but no bookmarks. Now, if you want some bookmarks but not these text anchors? Hm. Well, I guess you could go back to the old hyperlink destination method… sigh.