PDF Bookmarks Not Showing? How to Find Them or Add Them

Updated 2026-11-04

You open a PDF that should have a table of contents in the sidebar and there is nothing - or you saved bookmarks and your reader still shows page thumbnails. Either the bookmarks are there but the panel is not showing them, or the file does not contain any.

Below is the quickest way to tell which case you are in, followed by the fix for each. It takes a few minutes and you do not need to upload the file anywhere.

Use the tool: Online PDF Bookmark Editor

First: open the bookmarks panel in your reader

A PDF reader keeps bookmarks in a side panel that is often closed or set to a different view. In Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer, the menu button at the top left toggles the sidebar, and the sidebar shows page thumbnails by default. When the file has bookmarks, a second tab - the document outline - appears next to the thumbnails; click it to see the bookmark tree. We tried this with a PDF that carries a bookmark outline: Chrome still left the sidebar on thumbnails, and the bookmarks were one click away.

Other readers have their own switch - usually a "Bookmarks", "Outline" or "Table of contents" item in the sidebar or the View menu. If you only see thumbnails and no such option, read on.

Does the file have bookmarks at all?

In Chrome’s viewer the outline tab only appears when the file contains bookmarks. In our test, a PDF without bookmarks showed a sidebar with thumbnails only - not even a tab strip. If your reader offers no outline option, or its bookmarks panel is empty, the PDF most likely has no bookmarks.

You can also check in the PDF Bookmark Editor: open the file and the Bookmarks panel lists what it contains. "No bookmarks yet" means the file most likely has none.

Common reasons the bookmarks are missing

A table of contents page is not the same as bookmarks. The printed contents pages inside the document are ordinary page content; the bookmarks in the sidebar are separate navigation data, and a document can have one without the other.

The file was re-created. Printing to PDF, "Save as PDF" from an app, and some conversion or optimization tools produce a brand-new file, and the bookmarks of the original often stay behind unless the tool explicitly copies them. If the bookmarks vanished after you processed the file, compare with the original.

Scanned books. A scan is a set of images, and unless someone built an outline for it there is nothing in the sidebar. The bookmarks have to be created - see the next section.

The viewer does not support them. Some in-app previewers show only the pages and have no bookmarks panel; open the file in a full PDF reader to check.

The file has no bookmarks: add them

It takes a few minutes:

Open the PDF Bookmark Editor and load the file (parsed locally, never uploaded)
Click "Auto-generate" to detect chapter headings (scans are read with local OCR), or "Import bookmarks from TOC text" to paste a table of contents, or "Add bookmark" to create entries by hand
Check the entries by clicking them - the preview jumps to each target page
Click "Save PDF", open the new file in your reader and switch to its bookmarks or outline panel

After saving: open the panel yourself

The saved file also sets the standard PageMode flag (UseOutlines), which asks readers to open the bookmarks panel automatically. Readers that honor the flag do so; Chrome’s built-in viewer does not - there you still click the outline tab yourself.

FAQ

Why does Chrome show thumbnails instead of my bookmarks?

Chrome’s PDF viewer keeps its sidebar on thumbnails by default. If the file has bookmarks, switch to the outline tab next to the thumbnails. If there is no such tab, the file has no bookmarks.

I added bookmarks and saved, but they still do not appear. Why?

Make sure you opened the newly downloaded file, not the original, and that you clicked "Save PDF" after adding the bookmarks. Then switch your reader to its bookmarks or outline panel - saved files ask readers to open it, but not every reader (Chrome’s built-in viewer, for one) follows that request.

Are bookmarks and a table of contents page the same thing?

No. Bookmarks are the clickable tree in the reader’s sidebar; a contents page is an ordinary page inside the document. A file can have either or both - this tool can also generate a clickable contents page from your bookmarks.

Can I add bookmarks to a scanned PDF?

Yes. "Auto-generate" reads the contents pages of a scan with local OCR, or you can paste the table-of-contents text and set the page offset.