Name It
We are pleased to announce Name It 3.01 which now includes a Name It tool bar when used with Acrobat X/XI/DC — improving your user experience.
Name It is an Acrobat plug-in which makes the creation of PDF named destinations easy with a simple user interface. You can create them one at a time, or in batch from bookmarks or pages, and in more advanced ways such as in an Acrobat action or batch sequence. It even automatically rebuilds damaged name trees.
Named destinations enable your PDF documents to be navigated more easily on the Web and are also ideal for on-line manuals and help documentation, particularly if regular updates occur — named destinations act as anchors within a PDF, so that you can link (internally or externally) to a specific named view within the PDF rather than a fixed page number.
Name It 3.0 is fully compatible with Acrobat X/XI/DC, and the new features will help you to streamline your workflows by using Name It functionality within Acrobat actions (Acrobat X and later), or batch processing (Acrobat 9 or earlier). Find out more about the new functionality in the Actions and Batch Sequences section below.
What is a named destination?
A named destination is a destination view of part (or all) of a particular page of a PDF document, and is a standard feature of PDF files. This specific view is stored within the PDF with an associated name.
Named destinations thus enable a user to name a view on a page of a document with a text name such as introduction, in a similar way to a bookmark referring to a particular view. But, these named destinations can then be set to be the destinations of links or bookmarks when Name It is installed.
If you use named destinations for inter-document links then it will not matter if documents are updated as long as they include all the required named destinations. This makes updates much simpler as links in existing documents do not need to be changed because they use the names rather than specific page numbers and views.
Note: Name It is only required to create and manipulate the named destinations. Once the PDFs are complete, they can be distributed to anyone, regardless of whether or not they have Name It.
How Name It Works
Name It makes it easy to create multiple named destinations in one go. With one button click you can create named destinations for all the bookmarks in a PDF file, for each page, apply them to multiple files in batch mode, or use Name It's power in an Acrobat action or batch sequence! So, if you have to re-create a PDF, you can easily re-create the named destinations too.
The Name It menu provides one-click access to the main functions. There is also a Name It Control Panel to view the named destinations in the document and perform more advanced functions.
Why Use Named Destinations?
The real benefit of using named destinations is when you are using PDF documents in conjunction with the World-Wide Web or on-line help systems. Normally if you link to a PDF document (and you are using Acrobat within your Web browser) you will see the first page. However, if you have named destinations in the document and you link to a URL like doc.pdf#introduction the browser will open the PDF at the named destination called introduction — wherever it is in the document.
Main Features
From the Name It tool bar, found in Acrobat's Tools pane, you can:
- Create named destinations by bookmark (destinations have the same names as the bookmarks)
- Create by page (destinations have the names Page1, Page2, ...)
You can opt to use the page label as the name of the destination (the ‘logical number’ shown under thumbnail image of a page when viewing the Pages panel in Acrobat) or just name them Page1, Page2, etc - Create destinations for links (i.e. for each link that goes to a view in the same or another PDF, within a folder of PDF documents, create a named destination for that view and change the link to point to the new destination)
- Create in batch using Name It's own batch feature, or using an Acrobat action or batch sequence
- Edit and rename existing named destinations
- Full import and export facility for a single PDF or entire folder as a CSV or XML file (XML for export only) — the resulting file can be viewed and edited in a spreadsheet such as Excel
- Export bookmark-related named destinations
- Create links to named destinations
- Remove all destinations (e.g. to clean up before creating new ones)
Name It also provides a mechanism for converting links which use named destinations to normal Acrobat links. This may sound bizarre, but has proved to be very useful for some systems where people are merging multiple PDF documents containing named destinations, which happen to use the same names in different documents.
Name It will also automatically rebuild damaged or incomplete name trees (which contain the named destinations) as best it can, resulting in a tree where all valid destinations can be found. There are some PDF creation applications out there that create such bad trees! Damaged name trees usually result in some named destinations not working because Acrobat cannot find the name in the damaged tree.
Actions and Batch Sequences
Name It 3.0 makes its functionality available to Acrobat actions and batch sequences. Using either of those, you can combine several different steps into a multi-step action, thus simplifying your PDF workflow. See below for an example of what you might do.
Acrobat actions are available in Acrobat X/XI/DC from the Action Wizard group on the Tools pane, or from the File menu (Acrobat X/XI only). In Acrobat versions 5 to 9, you need to look for Acrobat's batch processing, which is available under Advanced | Document Processing | Batch Processing.
You can add any of the following Name It functionality as a step to an action, in any order:
- Export Bookmark Destinations
- Export Destinations
- Remove All Destinations
- Create Destinations for Links
- Create Destinations by Page
- Create Destinations by Bookmark
As an example, you could use Name It's Create Destinations by Bookmark as one step, and set the PDF to open with bookmarks showing using Document Processing | Set Open Options as another step. Using Acrobat X the action might look like the following when being created:
You can see the functionality available from Name It in the list on the left above. Why not download this action sequence and try it out:
Name It Example action — right-click and select “Save Target As...”.
With Acrobat X, install it by double-clicking on the “.sequ” file. Alternatively, go to Acrobat's Action Wizard, click on Edit Actions, then click on the Import button and select the “.sequ” file you saved.
Import and Export Files
You can export named destinations for a file or folder, with a choice of doing it for all destinations, or only those going to bookmarks (e.g. when you have used the “Create Destinations by Bookmark” function). The resulting file can be saved as a CSV file for use in a spreadsheet package such as Excel, and also for later import using Name It to create revised destinations.
Name It 3.0 also enables the export of the named destination data to an XML file (encoded in UTF-8) which can be viewed in a spreadsheet package such as Excel — but note that Name It does not support reading XML files for import via the batch functionality. Exporting to XML will be of benefit when any destinations might have characters outside the standard ISO Latin-1 and ANSI character sets. If that is the case, Unicode will be required and so XML is necessary as the CSV format does not support Unicode.
The format of the CSV or XML file contains rows and columns as detailed in the 
Name It On-line Guide.
