linking to headings in PDF documents

Kevin Hunter kevinh at excelsystems.com
Mon Oct 2 09:32:00 PDT 2006


Hi all,
 
I create user guides for a software company, and we distribute these guides as PDFs with the software downloads.
 
One of our products is a web portal. As part of the initial install of this web portal, we want to include an HTML TOC to the various sections within the user guide PDF. As the first attempt, I just created all my book files as individual PDFs, and that worked fine - I created links to the individual documents.
 
However, now we also want to use portions of the user guide as help text for various features in the product. 
 
So what I think I need to do is create HTML links to named destionations within my PDF file. I haven't found a simple way to do this; I tried opening the PDF in acrobat and viewed named destinations, and wrote down the names of the chapter headings on a piece of paper, and I surmised that I could then create a hypertext link along the lines of:
 
...Nexus3RefGuideBuild1.pdf#page=6
 
or
 
...Nexus3RefGuideBuild1.pdf#nameddest=m5.9.14293...
 
(referencing 
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdf#search=%22pdf%20open%20to%20page%20url%22)
However, that doesn't seem to work, in a browser. Or at least I haven't been able to make it work.
 
Ideally, I'd like to be able to extract the links that exist in my framemaker table of contents, and create URL's that go straight to those locations. Our help links don't have to be any more granular than the document TOC.
 
In other products what we have done is use webworks to create an HTML version, and then strip out the links from the hhc file and add them to the product, but that has been time-consuming, and we've then had to build both versions of the user guide (PDF and CHM) into the download; in this case, my PDF is 17mb, we'd like to avoid creating another massive file to have to include in the product download.
 
If anyone has any suggestions on how to approach this I'd really appreciate them.
 
Thanks!
 
Kevin
 
 


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