Tuesday, April 27, 2010

My Feature Request for Adobe Reader

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

*******Enhancement / FMR*********
Brief title for your desired feature:

Title: User Defined Bookmarks.

How would you like the feature to work?
Very simple idea: I would like to be able to bookmark locations in a PDF that you are reading. This should be completely separate functionality from the bookmarks that define the PDF's structure, and should not require modifying the PDF, but of course this would be an implementation detail.

Why is this feature important to you?
If the PDF has 100s or 1000s of pages, you can jump to the last place you were reading, or an important piece of information that you need to refer to frequently. I often refer to very large specification documents, and need to refer to to the same few sections over and over, day after day, and always have to search for the section number or title, instead of being able to bookmark the location and jump to the bookmark. I also use eBooks for my studies, and if I spend a semester reading through the book, I would like to be able to bookmark how far I have read. This is something that is so simple to do with real paper books, and I am baffled as to why this concept has not yet made it into the cyberworld.

If this is a new idea and you decide, I hope you will credit the idea to my name, Matthias Breithaupt. Thanks :-)

This has been posted on my blog as proof that I had this idea at this time, and if nobody else has thought of this I claim the Copyright.

Footnote added after submitting request: it gets even worse when the document is scanned from paper and has not been converted to searchable text. How do you find section 9.3.5 in a document which has 1000 pages and each page is just an image of the text, and not actual text that you can search?