Is it possible to let pdf automatically pop up the bookmark panel when opened?

Question

Is it possible to let pdf automatically pop up the bookmark panel when opened ? Like in Adobe reader or Foxit reader.

Answer 1

There is a default setting inside the .pdf itself (i.e. it's set when the PDF is created).

IIRC there was a Adobe Reader setting to override that, but I've not seen this program near my computer for a long time.

Answer 2

PDF metadata can include "initial view" information to give a preference to the PDF reader software. Check the document properties in your PDF viewer to see the values for a given PDF. Most PDF reader software also allows the user to set preferences about the initial view. So the user can instruct the software to "follow" the PDF metadata advice or force it to some other view. Check the PDF reader preferences settings for "initial view" to change the settings.

Answer 3

Every PDF has a default "initial view" built in.

But almost every viewer can override what the file itself asks for its initial view. So what the file asks for may not be honored by the viewer (be it Acrobat, be it Reader, be it Foxit, be it whatever...).

You can also use Ghostscript to modify an existing PDF so that it uses a different initial view. Here's how:

1. Create a textfile pdfmark.txt:

This should be the content:

[ /PageMode /UseOutlines
  /DOCVIEW pdfmark

2. Run a Ghostscript command referring to textfile and input.pdf:

This should be the commandline (I'm assuming you are on Windows -- for Linux or MacOSX it's similar, just replace gswin32c.exe by gs and the line continuation marks ^ by \:

gswin32c.exe ^
   -o output.pdf ^
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
    input.pdf ^
    pdfmark.txt

Voila!, your output.pdf should open now with the bookmarks pane open (unless the viewer's settings were changed by the user to override such a dictatorial behaviour of random PDFs).

Alternatively, you could do it without the text file by just running a single, but longer GS command:

gswin32c.exe ^
   -o output.pdf ^
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
   -c "[ /PageMode /UseThumbs /DOCVIEW pdfmark"
   -f input.pdf

Note, I modified this last command to get the viewer open the file with the thumbnails preview pane instead of the bookmarks one.