PDF export creates bookmarks at end of prior section

Question

We create documentation for our product in Confluence and publish it online in a publicly available Confluence install.  For those customers who may not have access to it or who prefer doc in book form, we publish the doc in a PDF (200+ pages long).  We've customized the PDF stylesheet so it forces a new page for every h2 and h3 heading level.  The bookmarks created within the PDF, however, seem to jump the user to the end of the prior section/chapter, which is sometimes a half a page before the new page starts.  So, it appears to users that the bookmark jumped them nowhere - if they scrolled down, they'd see the next chapter but it's not an ideal user experience.

My guess is that the PDF sets the bookmark for the section and then forces the new page, but I have no way of knowing that or how to change it.  Anyone have any suggestions for how to fix this (besides paying for the Scroll exporter)?

Thanks in advance -

Cassandra

Cassandra Targe1 · Answer

I also tried the page-break macro, but tried it at the beginning of the real one, and it didn't work at all. I didn't even think of trying page-break-after at the end of the preceding page.

I mostly solved it by buying the Scroll PDF Export tool. It's really nice once you figure out all the options, and it handles the page breaks & bookmarks much better than the default PDF export (although we're still using the one in 3.4.3, so perhaps it has improved).

Steffen Heller · Answer

I had the same problem when I tried automatic pagebreaks.

I now add pagebreaks manually with a little makro. But even this only works when you add the makro to the end of the preceding page instead of the beginning of the real one (and use "page-break-after" instead of "page-break-before").

This won't work as a solution for 200+ pages documents but it probably shows that your interpretation of the problem is correct.