Bookmarks (Outlines)

Updated on Jun 3, 2026

Bookmarks, or outlines, are a tree-structured hierarchy that the reader presents as a visual table of contents separated from the actual content as a side panel. Bookmark items allow users to navigate through parts of the document and invoke different actions. RadPdfProcessing enables you to create bookmarks, modify existing ones, and save the changes into the PDF document.

BookmarkItem Class

The BookmarkItem class represents a single bookmark inside the RadPdfProcessing model. Each bookmark can have the following characteristics described in the respective properties:

Property	Description
IsExpanded	Determines whether the bookmark item is open or closed by default. An item is open when its children are visible upon opening the document in a viewer.
Action	Gets the action to perform when this bookmark item is activated. See the Action help topic.
Destination	Gets the destination to display when this bookmark item is activated. See the Destination help topic.
NamedDestination	Gets the named destination to display when this bookmark item is activated. See the Named Destinations topic.
TextStyle	Gets or sets the style characteristics for displaying the bookmark item text. Of type BookmarkItemStyles (a flags enum with values Normal, Italic, and/or Bold).
TextColor	Gets or sets the color of the bookmark item text in RGB color space.
Title	Gets or sets the text to display in the viewer navigation pane for this bookmark item.
Children	Gets the immediate child elements for this bookmark item.

Working with BookmarkItem

The BookmarkItem class exposes several constructor overloads that enable you to set the title of the bookmark and what action executes when users click it:

• BookmarkItem(string title, Action action)
• BookmarkItem(string title, Destination destination)
• BookmarkItem(string title, NamedDestination namedDestination)

C#

Location location = new Location();
location.Page = document.Pages[0];
location.Left = 10;
location.Top = 10;
BookmarkItem bookmark = new BookmarkItem("Title", location);
bookmark.TextColor = new RgbColor(255, 0, 255);
bookmark.TextStyle = BookmarkItemStyles.Bold | BookmarkItemStyles.Italic;
bookmark.IsExpanded = true;

Bookmarks Collection

The Bookmarks property exposed through the RadFixedDocument class allows you to access all the bookmarks in a document so you can add, remove, or reorder them. This property is a collection of BookmarkItem objects that represent each bookmark.

To insert a bookmark in a document, add it to the Bookmarks collection. The following example shows how to add the BookmarkItem created in the previous example:

C#

document.Bookmarks.Add(bookmark);

To remove a bookmark, use the same collection. In the following example, the second bookmark inside the document is removed:

C#

BookmarkItem bookmark1 = document.Bookmarks[1];
document.Bookmarks.RemoveAt(1);

If you need to iterate all bookmarks in a document, note that each BookmarkItem can contain other bookmarks in its Children collection. In such cases, you need to iterate the Bookmarks collection recursively.

C#

private static void IterateBookmarks(Telerik.Windows.Documents.Fixed.Model.RadFixedDocument document)
{
    foreach (BookmarkItem bookmark in document.Bookmarks)
    {
        IterateBookmarksHierarchy(bookmark);
    }
}

private static void IterateBookmarksHierarchy(BookmarkItem bookmark)
{
    foreach (BookmarkItem child in bookmark.Children)
    {
        IterateBookmarksHierarchy(child);
    }
}

See Also

• Annotations
• Named Destinations
• RadFixedDocument
• BookmarkItem API Reference