Some PDF Links not working

[Shlomo Perets]

Fei Min,

You wrote:

>I'm using FrameMaker 7.2p158, Distiller 6.0.0 5/15/2003, and Windows
>XP.
>
>We recently noticed that a lot of the cross-references in FrameMaker
>didn't translate into working links in the PDF. ...

With FM6.x and 7.x , with/without structure, having "Create Named 
Destinations for All Paragraphs" (in PDF Setup, Links tab) turned OFF, is 
known to cause "some" bad links in PDFs, quite often -- this equally 
applies to links generated from cross-references or from hypertext markers.

Many PDFs authored in FrameMaker have this problem (even some of the PDFs 
distributed with FrameMaker as online manuals), but very few producers use 
a PDF link checker to verify that all links are functional. And while 
Distiller 5 and earlier included a limited warning relating to undefined 
destinations used by internal links/bookmarks in the file being distilled, 
this functionality ware removed from Distiller 6 or 7.
(The Distiller 5 message was "Warning: The following Names in Name Tree 
Dests were not defined", followed by a list of the named destinations).

Having this setting turned ON will create a larger PDF (as each 10 names 
destinations take up approximately 1KB, and in some documents you may have 
many paragraphs per page, eg tables where each cell has at least one 
paragraph even if it is otherwise empty).

If you produce PDFs that have no cross-file links between them, you may use 
the Acrobat function to remove unused named destinations, but this should 
be done with care (as these functions could easily damage some interactive 
items).

If file size is a consideration and you have cross-file links in PDFs, you 
may also use the UnBloat function in my FrameMaker-to-Acrobat TimeSavers 
add-on (executed as part of the distilling process) -- see 
http://www.microtype.com/TimeSavers.html for more details and users' feedback.


Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com
Training, consulting & add-ons: FrameMaker, Structured FM and Acrobat