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I'm close to finishing up my dissertation, in Word sadly (it was too late to switch to Mellel for this project!), and I'm seriously upset that Word cannot print to PDF with bookmarks for the table of contents (like it can using Adobe Acrobat on Windows). Yet another reason I'm done with Word (there are so many reason), but I've noticed that Mellel can't output TOC (Heading Level) bookmarks either. Now, I'm not sure how (or even if) this can be done, but I'd LOVE to see this feature find its way into Mellel. (Can't PDF's be tagged somehow to do this? I'm pretty sure FrameMaker does it.) Show this feature requrest some love.

Doug

This is another nice feature of FrameMaker ... in the "create Acrobat links" option, you can indicate which paragraph styles you want to include in the PDF TOC, and also whether you want to include index links ...

I vote "Yes" on this one, but I don't think it's very urgent. LaTeX can do it too (including links and so forth). So yes, for Mellel it would be definitely a good move to export the Outline pane into a structured PDF TOC.

The Mellel guide actually is a PDF document that has a TOC structure displayed for instance in Preview's drawer. According to the info pane entry of this PDF, it was created from Mellel using OS X's PDF engine. So this makes me wonder how the TOC-structure in the Mellel guide PDF was created. Maybe a secret feature in Mellel?:?

matthias

I think this is an important feature,
1) since documents are often sent electronically rather than printed these days
2) cross-referencing is coming
3) competitors have it (LaTeX; OpenOffice, I think; Papyrus in the latest version, some versions of Word with Acrobat Distiller).

Ideally it would work with all links in the document: the table of contents, yes, but also cross-references and bibliographic references.

[Edited for typo]

Matthias, I bet the pdf was created using the standard print-to-pdf dialogue, then marked up in Acrobat pro.

nicka wrote:Matthias, I bet the pdf was created using the standard print-to-pdf dialogue, then marked up in Acrobat pro.

As far as I can tell, the only way to create bookmarks straight from a document (on a Mac) is to use an Adobe product. FrameMaker and InDesign both export document structure to PDF.

However, I've also found an addon for OpenOffice that claims to do this as well. It's called extendedPDF and can be found at http://www.3bview.com/epdf-home.html. I haven't been able to test this, because I only have NeoOffice on my computer, and I haven't figured out how to modify the install program to get it to work with NeoOffice. But it's worth looking into to see how another program exports document structure to PDFs.

Doug

Dougray wrote:

nicka wrote:Matthias, I bet the pdf was created using the standard print-to-pdf dialogue, then marked up in Acrobat pro.

As far as I can tell, the only way to create bookmarks straight from a document (on a Mac) is to use an Adobe product. FrameMaker and InDesign both export document structure to PDF.

As it has been already said in this thread: LaTeX does this as well.

Dougray, NeoOffice (or OpenOffice) can produce pdfs with a TOC as well.

I also need this functionality quite urgently since I want to put pdfs of my articles and essays online. (I already have them as html, however, the stupid Google Scholar service only indexes pdfs. Grumble.)

I would also think that getting pdfs with a TOC is good because my guess is that Google and Google Scholar index the TOC too and thus place your pdf higher in the results of those searches that include those words that are in your TOC. This would really be a lovely feature!

Actually, I am waiting for this feature to be implemented before I convert my texts to pdfs because otherwise I have to export them as rtf, then import them into Word, assign header styles to the headings using Words search&replace functionality, then import the doc into OpenOffice, do some more fiddling and then finally export the document with a working TOC (and a bad layout) as pdf... This is a very work-intensive process, and the result is less than satisfying.

This is off topic, but I like Papyrus concept of an "editable" PDF. It's a PDF that opens normally in any computer, but contains a binary blurb with the Papyrus file, which means that the file can be easily shared.

Has anybody tried this out? I'd love if Mellel had some kind of similar functionality or a simple approach such as including a RTF/PDF in the Mellel package.

aechallu wrote:This is off topic, but I like Papyrus concept of an "editable" PDF. It's a PDF that opens normally in any computer, but contains a binary blurb with the Papyrus file, which means that the file can be easily shared.

Has anybody tried this out? I'd love if Mellel had some kind of similar functionality or a simple approach such as including a RTF/PDF in the Mellel package.

That would be quite handy, cross-platform, and just an overall great idea!

Dougray wrote:As far as I can tell, the only way to create bookmarks straight from a document (on a Mac) is to use an Adobe product. FrameMaker and InDesign both export document structure to PDF.

Actually, NoteBook from Circus Ponies creates clickable PDF links when using the 'Save as PDF...' feature in 10.4's print dialogue. So it must be possible to create 'live' PDFs without writing one's own PDF generator (and using standard OS X APIs).

t must be possible to create 'live' PDFs without writing one's own PDF generator (and using standard OS X APIs).

I hope so. And I hope that the Redlers have already found these APIs and are implementing them as we speak...

nicka wrote:

t must be possible to create 'live' PDFs without writing one's own PDF generator (and using standard OS X APIs).

I hope so. And I hope that the Redlers have already found these APIs and are implementing them as we speak...

I believe these added abilities are from 10.4's new PDFKit. However, these PDF features are not available in 10.3 or earlier. Also, these features (I believe) come from a separate "Export", than a simple "print to PDF".

rpcameron wrote:

nicka wrote:

It must be possible to create 'live' PDFs without writing one's own PDF generator (and using standard OS X APIs).

I hope so. And I hope that the Redlers have already found these APIs and are implementing them as we speak...

I believe these added abilities are from 10.4's new PDFKit. However, these PDF features are not available in 10.3 or earlier. Also, these features (I believe) come from a separate "Export", than a simple "print to PDF".

Actually, in Circus Ponies' NoteBook the features come from a simple 'print to PDF' -- there is no separate 'Export'. I was surprised myself, but have checked it a few times and the simple 'print to PDF' creates 'live' PDFs with clickable links (as you note, though, this is only available on 10.4+).