No, seriously, WTF is up with Mongoose's PDF bookmarks?

[Hakkonen]

I just picked up Aliens of Charted Space 1 and 2, Swords Worlds, and Traveller Companion in DTRPG's Traveller sale. Neither Aliens 1 nor Sword Worlds are correctly bookmarked, and all four are locked out of letting the user edit or create bookmarks. This is really sloppy work.

Aliens 1: The entire K'kree chapter is not bookmarked.

Sword Worlds: All bookmarks from "Political Astrography" to "Denisov Battlecruiser" are branched off from "Introduction." Neither the Diplomatic Corps nor the Scientific Corps headings have their own bookmarks; nor does the start of Chapter 4, Naval Forces. I'm not going to go into an exhaustive list, these are just the errors I found as soon as I started looking.

Mongoose, either organize and bookmark your PDFs correctly, unlock them so the user can bookmark them correctly, or (the best option) both. I quite like Traveller, as both a game and a setting, but I'm increasingly unimpressed with the quality of Mongoose's work, especially given that I paid ~$25 for each of these PDFs.

[MongooseMatt]

Hey there,

Sorry it took so long to get back to you, we had some trouble replicating your results.

In the end, the only system we could get this happening on is Chrome's own PDF reader - is that what you are using? Everything else seems to be fine.

Anyone else had this particular issue with these PDFs?

[ruhalla]

I don't experience the error he's pointing out in Aliens of chartered space vol 1 the k'ree bookmarks show up in sumatra pdf and when opening it directly in chrome.

The Sword Worlds book has introduction at the top of the tree and all chapters after that as entries under introduction until i hit the vehicles section then PK-1065 Panssaroitu Kuljetsu
is at the same line/level as introduction.

The difference here is my version of Chartered space i bought from the mongoose website but the Sword worlds one i bought from drivethrough.
maybe an incorrect version on drivethrough ?

[MongooseMatt]

No, they should be the same files on our site and Drivethru.

The common factor here may be Chrome - can someone please try the free Adobe Acrobat Reader and see if they can replicate this? We seem to only have this issue on Chrome right now...

[Condottiere]

I hadn't noticed, but Sword Worlds seems screwed up, and for convenience I tend to open up PDFs in Opera.

[Annatar Giftbringer]

I can check tonight when I get home from work.

I mostly read ebooks on my phone or iPad, with Apples’ Books app. The only bookmarks I have available are the links from the contents page, and they work.

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Ok, I tried Aliens of Charted Space vol 1 and Sword Worlds with Adobe Acrobat Reader on a Win 10 PC. Bookmarks seem to work, however for some reason every bookmark in AoCS 1 appears twice, with one copy acting as a sub-header to the first. If I click the top-layer bookmark link, it goes to the contents on p.2, but if I use the sub-header instead I'm sent to the right page.

EDIT: I tried both books with Microsoft Edge too. I get doubles of every bookmark here too, and the sub-header is the one that works. Except for the K'kree chapter, those bookmarks only work in Adobe Reader. I see the bookmarks in with Edge, but nothing happens when I click on them. Sword Worlds in Edge works with most of the bookmarks, but when I click some of them nothing happens, like with K'kree. Others work fine.

[Ursus Maior]

The common factor here may be Chrome - can someone please try the free Adobe Acrobat Reader and see if they can replicate this? We seem to only have this issue on Chrome right now...

I use Adobe, but not the free reader since I have the full suite.

Sword World cascades nicely with two layers of bookmarks. Aliens Vol. I and II do not show cascading bookmarks. There is only one layer, i. e. everything is a top-level bookmark. All in all, bookmarks seem not to be consistenly managed in PDFs: Pirates of Drinax has one (Vol. II, including typos and formatting errors) or two layers (Vol. I and III). The Drinaxian Companion has only one layer, but Shadows of Sindal features two. Deepnight Revelation (all four volumes) seems to feature only one level of bookmarks without capitalization.

Again, not the Adobe free, but I would expect Adobe to offer the same experience in both software applications.