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I'm experiencing a strange error when bookmarking pages in a PDF document using Preview. If I bookmark a file whose book-listed page is 666 and whose actual page within the document is 703, for example, preview will bookmark the book-listed page 703 which occurs in the actual document at page 740. The only way I can get a bookmark for the page listed at 666 is to find the pdf-page 666 and create the bookmark there (which is page 629 in the book-listing).

I never encountered this strange behaviour on my MacBook Air 2013, but I recently upgraded to the Macbook Air 2020. Has anyone else experienced the same issue and if so, how did you fix this?

I'm using Preview version 11.0 (999.4) I'm running macOS 10.15.7

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  • I'm also having this problem since upgrading to Big Sur
    – dmt
    Jan 7, 2021 at 8:28

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I was having this problem after updating to Big Sur and tried turning off logical page numbers by going to Preferences > PDF and then unticking the Viewing documents: use logical page numbers box. This worked for me.

Funnily enough, this is the opposite to what Apple tell you to do, as discussed here.

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    nice workaround. This is still a bug that needs to be fixed by the macos team at apple; bookmarks still need to work if "use logical numbers" is turned on. This problem is still a thing in Monterey
    – xdavidliu
    Feb 5, 2022 at 14:46
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Apple did change the way that Preview handles logical vs absolute page numbers at some point, and it's not entirely good.

Preview shows logical page numbers only in thumbnail view

It's also worth pointing out that Preview's Bookmarks are entirely proprietary: they only work in Preview (and possibly other Apple apps), and are outside of the PDF standard (which has its own perfectly good mechanism for bookmarks).

"Other PDF viewers are available."

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