checking links in Word and Frame docs

[Fred Ridder]

Let's see if I can keep this stupid Windows Live mail client 
from making a total mess of things this time...
 
Walter Hudson wrote:
> a key concern (ie, pain in the keester) is verifying the 
> hypertext links in these docs before and after they get 
> PDFed. (as per usual, no one seems to have the time 
> since we are pretty overwhelmed with the volume of 
> docs here...)
> 
> Any tips on plug-ins, add-ons, standalone utilities that can 
> do these tasks?
> 1. within Word files
> 2. within Frame
> 3. within PDFs
Are you talking about verification or validation? Tools can 
validate links (i.e. make sure they are not dead), but AFAIK 
it takes an intelligententity to verify that the link really goes 
to the right place. 
 
Within FrameMaker, it's fairly easy to validate cross-references 
(which will become links in the PDF you produce from the book) 
by using Find/Change and searching for unresolved cross-references. 
For hypertext commands, you can use the Esc, v, h key sequence 
to validate all hypertext commands in a document or across a book 
(see the help topic Hypertext and View-Only Documents/Testing 
and troubleshooting hypertext documents for more details). Within a PDF file, you will need to use an external tool to validate links.A few years back, the "standard" tool was called Ari's Link Checker, which was bundled with a couple other useful PDF tools in a $99 packagefrom Dionysys.com. But it appears that Dionysus was acquired by anothercompany, who were in turn acquired by another company called ARTS. And ARTS only offers Link Checker as a component of a suite of tools called PDF Aerialist, which costs $499 per copy. That seems pretty steep to me, but I guess it's up to you to determine how quickly the time you save will cover the cost of the tool. As to MS Word, a couple of minutes with Google returned a hit for a freeware tool called Document Hyperlink Checker from AbleBits.com.I have no idea how well it works, but the price makes it a low-riskproposition. Fred Ridder
_________________________________________________________________
Your smile counts. The more smiles you share, the more we donate.  Join in.
www.windowslive.com/smile?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Wave2_oprsmilewlhmtagline