# hyperref/bookmark package: suppress/override a single bookmark

So I am using hyperref to generate pdf bookmarks but one of my section names uses greek letters, which disappears in the pdf bookmark. So I want to override that bookmark (and only that bookmark).

MWE

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[bookmarksnumbered]{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{Theorem of $\alpha$ something}
\end{document}


I want the section title to still appear as greek letter in the toc and body, but redefine the bookmark to Theorem of alpha something. Using

\currentpdfbookmark{\thesection\ Theorem of alpha something}{}


simply creates another bookmark, not replace the existing one

Greek letters can also be used in bookmarks:

• Unicode encoding is needed, because the 8-bit PDFDocEncoding does not contain all letter and symbols. This can be achieved by option unicode or pdfencoding=auto.

• Option psdextra redefines lots of math symbol commands to work within bookmarks.

Example:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[
bookmarksnumbered,
pdfencoding=auto,
psdextra,
]{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{Theorem of $\alpha$ something}
\end{document}


An alternative is the use of \texorpdfstring. The first argument is the normal text, the second the replacement for the bookmarks:

\section{Theorem of \texorpdfstring{$\alpha$}{\textalpha}}


This gets also rid of the warnings about the dollars, which enable and disable math mode – bookmarks do not know about TeX's math mode.

• Thanks, that is quick. And I totally dodged the XY problem. – TwiNight Apr 30 '16 at 23:17