linking to headings in PDF documents

[Art Campbell]

The easiest way to do this would be to generate a book level TOC from
the user guide(s) in FM that includes headings down to the level you
want to support. Turn on hypertext links and use the resulting TOC
.pdf instead of the HTML you're specifying.

Taking it a step further, (I haven't tried this part), the links from
the TOC to the .pdf user content may remain as cross-references if you
save the TOC .PDF as an HTML file from Acrobat. I generate my books as
a single file rather than multiple discrete files as you do, so I
don't know if the info will transfer when you convert only the TOC to
HTML; the links do remain if you convert the entire book to HTML.

Art


On 10/2/06, Kevin Hunter <kevinh at excelsystems.com> wrote:
> 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


-- 
Art Campbell                                             art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
               and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
                             No disclaimers apply.
                                     DoD 358