How to Create Outlines in PDF And Why You Need Them

If navigating through a text is difficult for you, as you get lost in a huge variety of fields, pages, and data, your document definitely needs a table of content or outlines. Their creation is not particularly difficult. But for you to quickly deal with this issue, we have compiled a small guide.

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How to Create an Outline in PDF

To focus the reader’s attention on some particularly important thoughts or parts of a text, you can highlight them with a bright color. It can be done in any PDF editor program. Depending on the platform and toolset of the editor you choose, the way outlines are created may differ slightly, but in general, you should follow a set of similar steps:

1. Upload the desired file from your device.

Upload file

2. Add a new page to your PDF using the Rearrange Pages tool.

Adding a new page in PDF

3. Go to the new page and write all headings of the document with an Add Text tool.

Adding text to a PDF

You can easily and quickly edit a PDF file in our online PDFLiner editor. Also, many programs let you create font outlines in PDF. It is explicitly done to ensure that PDF files open correctly in any vector program, and you do not receive "fonts missing" notifications. But does creating a PDF in illustrator automatically create outlines on fonts? Yes, as it is the safest and most fool-proof method. You can disable this option if necessary.

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Create Outlines in PDF: Why a Table of Contents Is Important

Creating outlines and a table of contents greatly simplifies working with multi-page documents. Good structure is especially important in legal and scientific papers because it is so easy to get lost in all these tables and terms.

With outlines, you can highlight the main parts of a file that you need to pay attention to first. Thus, you will create a short summary of the text, allowing a reader to grasp its essence immediately. A table of contents contains more concise information with an indication of chapters and parts.

By looking at it, any reader understands the document’s hierarchy and can find the required section. By clicking on an item of interest in the list, you can quickly get to the specified page of a text, and bright outlines will tell you what information is contained here. So you don’t have to read the entire page to see if there is any important data to you.

Each large section can consist of several paragraphs and subparagraphs. However, be careful not to overdo it. Too many outlines will make your text unreadable, and their use will become meaningless. Now that you know how to create outlines in PDF, your documents will become more structured.

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Liza Zdrazhevska
Content Marketer at PDFLiner