More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Acrobat's Page Thumbnails Panel

Did you know that Acrobat's Page Thumbnail panel has all kinds of useful and (perhaps even interesting) information about viewing percentages and selected page ranges? Probably not, because the UI is very small and so understated that it's tough to tell that it offers any helpful information. Talk a walk with me as we explore the Page Thumbnails panel together. To access the Page Thumbnails pane, click on the page icon at the top left of the PDF document.

Tiny Black Square

The black square in the lower right indicates the viewing area. It's sort of like the Navigator panel in Photoshop. In the case of this first image, I am viewing page 18-1.

But in the case of this second image, I am viewing page 10-7 (as indicated by the black square), but have page 10-8 selected (as indicated by the blue highlight).

In the case of this third image, I am viewing page 2-9, and also have page 2-9 selected.

When viewing pages in the Page Thumbnails pane, the location of the little black square will be determined by the zoom percentage.

Viewing at 100%

When you are zoomed in far enough, the little black square will also be accompanied by a black outline of the viewed area. The rest of the thumbnail is grayed out.

Viewing at 150%

 When you are zoomed in farther still, the outline will shrink even further.

Viewing at 300%… Left

You can use the document scrollbar to move scroll the document viewing area to the right; the black outline in the page thumbnail will move accordingly.

Viewing at 300%… Right

Alternatively, you can also click on the black outline and move it around. Be sure to hover directly over the black outline before you click. You'll know when you are hovering over the correct spot when the black arrow turns into a hand.

Blue Highlights

The blue highlighted background indicates which page/s you have selected in the Page Thumbnails Pane. By click and shift + clicking on a range of pages, you will select multiple pages. The page with the darker blue background is the first page you have selected (first click). The page with the darker blue outline is the last page you have selected (shift + click). If you were to go to File > Print, these are the pages that would print.

In this next image, I clicked first on page 17-10, and the shift+clicked on page 17-7. The result is that the blue outline and border are reversed from how they appear in the image directly above.

You can print a non-sequential page range by Cmd/Ctrl clicking on each of the page thumbnails. Alternatively, you can select the first page range by Click + Shift Clicking on the first page range, and then Cmd/Ctrl clicking on the remaining page thumbnails.

See how the page range is already filled in at the print dialog box?

More on the Page Thumbnails Panel...

If you found this article useful, you may also like one of other articles on the obscure and little-known functionality of the Acrobat Page Thumbnails Panel: How to Replace Pages in a PDF using Acrobat's Pages Panel.