Hyperlinks on images in structured FM9 -> PDF

[Zimmerman, Gary]

Hi Framers,

I want to place many hyperlink hotspots on a large image in structured FM9, to be published as a PDF file.  The image was originally drawn in Adobe Illustrator and saved as a PDF, and is imported by reference to the document.

I have managed to place hyperlink hotspots over my graphic using a text frames containing an unstructured hypertext markers (gotolink markers on image pointing to a newlink target marker where I want to link to go).

It works like a charm.  I click different parts of the graphic in the PDF to jump to different parts of the document.


But there's a problem:  The image will be updated fairly regularly.  When I tried updating the image, the hotspot links disappeared.  I had thought the text frames were "in a different layer" of the FM document, so would persist regardless of the image below them.  As long as the updated graphic was pretty close to the original, I thought, the hotspots would stay in their relative positions.  But alas, when I updated the image the hotspots were no more.

The ultimate goal, if possible, is to have a LOT of hotspots on a large graphic to use for document navigation.  I am forbidden from creating these links using Acrobat on the generated PDF.  The linking mechanism must be in the FM document itself so that we need not recreate the links manually any time we generate a new PDF file.

Similarly, however, because there will be so many links on the graphic, it would be impractical to manually recreate them all in the FM file every time the graphic is updated.

Is there something I am doing wrong, or some other way to achieve what I need - hotspot link areas that persist, even when the underlying graphic is changed, or is this simply beyond the capabilities of FM9 for PDF output?

Now that I think about it, if the graphic is changed, I don't know what the hotspot/text frames would hold on to, so to speak.  I would want them to move with the graphic, should pages or text be added or removed before the graphic, causing the graphic to move in the document.  So maybe I'm going at this the wrong way.  Our graphics are nested in the structure of the document more or less like this:

Topic
...
 Figure
  Graphic Container
   Graphic
...

where ... can be other elements within the Topic, like paragraphs, lists, tables, etc.  I don't know if there would be any way to, say, have the hotspots remain relative to the Figure or Graphic Container, so they persist when the graphic file is updated and re-imported.

Thanks very much for any help or suggestions.


-- garyZ



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