PDF Table of Contents

[David Cake]

I understand that the print version has been the focus (and that generally, Moon Design is very focussed on print production as the primary output, putting a lot of much appreciated effort into feature like indexes that not so important for PDFs), but there are aspects in which the PDFs could be improved. One is the table of contents – the Guide (both volumes) PDFs seem to have a PDF table of contents that is not at all useful, just a bunch of random things in no particular order. I’m not talking about the table of contents equivalent to the print version on pg 5 (which I note has embedded links, which is great), but what comes up when you use the Table of Contents feature on a PDF reader like Safari. This form of ToC is incredibly useful if using a PDF in a situation in which it might be useful to navigate fast (such as gaming) in particular.
Is it possible that we might see a revised PDF with this feature added at some point in the future?

It is doable with most professional PDF editing software. I’d do it myself if I thought it would be preserved across future revisions and sharable with others. Or you could ask The Design Mechanisms lads how they do it, as this is one thing they do consistently excellently.

While I’ve put this question into the Kickstarter forum, to be honest this issue applies to pretty much every Moon Design product.

Feel free to ask me about this directly.

[Mark Mohrfield]

In volume I you have to expand the bookmark titled “World Structure” and then the one under that titled “Eldar Races” to see most of important contents. Likewise, in volume 2 you have to expand the one titled “Seshnela” and then the one marked “Teshnos”. So most of them are there, but hidden in odd places.

[Qali]

I’m assuming this refers to the ‘Bookmarks’ or ‘Outlines’ (depending on PDF readers). While its nice to have bookmarks, I do have to say the bookmarks in the Guide PDFs are an absolute mess.

Some of the bookmarks include “_GoBack” (seen *many* times), “Bookmark 102” (which goes to Page 7 in the PDF), and “1341893da85ae8d9_resettlement” and “1341893da85ae8d9_tasks”.

I appreciate that someone took the time to put bookmarks in (appreciated) but they *really* need to be updated and corrected to be meaningful and, more importantly, useful.

[Lawrence]

We (Design Mechanism) do it all in InDesign using the Table of Contents facilities. This works the same way for print and pdf outputs, but the outputs change depending on whether you select the output to be Print or Interactive. We therefore generate two files: one for print publication and one for PDF publication, but we don’t go to any special lengths in the ToC prep. InDesign’s features are very good in that regard.

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