Some strange “whitespaces” are added to PDF bookmarks, if there are edited using Acrobat's bookmarks panel. Mostly they appear after editing an existing bookmark—often between two words or sometimes also within a word. But where do they come from? 

No, not from Acrobat, but from your keyboard! Originally these “whitespaces” are carriage returns, but Acrobat displays bookmark titles in a single line and carriage returns as a “whitespace”. So, if you're used to do editing just with your keyboard, which means you press F2 to start and the enter/return key to finish editing the bookmark, you'll now know why there are carriage returns—because you press the enter/return key!

This strange behavior—allowing carriage returns and also line feeds in single line bookmark titles—started with Adobe Acrobat 8 and continues in version 9.

Example

Create a new PDF document using File > Create PDF > From Blank Page and add a bookmark named “First bookmark” using the bookmarks panel. To finish editing the bookmark title, put the cursor at the end of “First” and press the enter/return key. And voilà, you'll see a bigger “whitespaces” between both words.

„First bookmark” is hex encoded as:
46697273740D20626F6F6B6D61726B,
where 0D is hex for ASCII character 13, which is a carriage return.

• Sample file: “First bookmark“ [PDF]
  

Details

Affected functions:

• View > Navigation Panels > Bookmarks

Tested versions:

• Windows
  • Adobe Acrobat 8.x
  • Adobe Acrobat 9.0.0

• Mac
  • ?
    

Status:

• Reported: Yes
• Replied: ?
• Fixed: ?

Workaround

• Do not press the enter/return key while editing a bookmark title.
• Click with your mouse somewhere in the navigation panel to finish editing.

Links

• n/a