Relative Link Paths

I think you can find the answer here

     http://indesignsecrets.com/making-relative-hyperlinks-to-files-in-indesign.php

In case the link stops from working. I copied the essential part:

"In CS4 and CS5, if you use the Hyperlinks panel to make a “File” type hyperlink, it appears to always be absolute. That’s too bad, because a “File” hyperlink seems like just what you’d want.

However, if you choose to make a URL hyperlink instead (choose URL in the Link To pop-up menu), it does create a relative link!"

See this add-on which I has written for InDesign CS6 on Mac using javascript.

There is a command from the add-on that make it possible to rename a "Live Snippet". I hoped if Adobe did the same with links mechanism.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4946725#4946725

I think that this is an instrumental philosophy issue related to the operating system and that because the computer must deal with any file or folder that had been renamed or moved as the same object (not a way of creating a new one and deleting the old) but exactly the same one with modified characteristics (its name or path) and reflecting these actions not only on operating system level but also communicating with the applications to synchronize these information with the files contents.

As an example of this communication:

The user: I want to rename the file apple.ai to be red_apple.ai.

The OS: Are you intending to create a new file or just change the name?

The user: Just change the name.

The OS: ANNOUNCING (The file apple.ai has a new name).

The user: Open the document Fruits_Menu.indd.

InDesign: Ohh. the file apple.ai gone. Let's ask the OS.

OS: No need to ask any one I hear you clearly, the file hadn't been deleted it's just has a new name which is red_apple.ai.

InDesign: OK. Thanks.

I think technically It's depending on the following:

The OS must understand what user intent when he rename or move a file or folder.

The application must ask the OS for these information.

I don't know if there is a hidden automatic produced ID for every file embedded in somewhere that could distinguish the file.

Until I found this discussion, I thought either everyone else knew how to control hyperlinks in Acrobat or else I didn't know how to phrase the question.  I tried a lot of different ways to find help on the internet, but this is the first link I've found where people seem to have a similar problem to mine.

I came back from a foreign vacation with thousands of photos, and with a lot of great memories of places I couldn't remember much about.  I spent months creating a MS Word 7.0 document where I pasted internet descriptions of all the places, monuments, unique restaurants, etc we'd visited. I created an ~ 10 page Table of Contents at the beginning of the document and hyperlinked each Table of Contents entry to the pages in the document where internet description was pasted.  I stored that document in the same directory with the nearly 2000 pictures we'd taken during the trip.

Next - to the right of each line of the TOC - I typed the filenames of the photographs we'd taken of that that place. Now I could choose a town, or monument from the TOC and jump either to a thorough description of the place or to pictures I'd personally taken. The result was so cool that I decided to share it with some of the people we'd traveled with, so I bought thumb drives and copied my pictures and the 500 page Word document onto the thumb drive.  In the copy of the Word Document I could no longer jump to my pictures.

Bear with me, there's a reason I talk about the Word Document.

While I had the Word Document open - from the thumb drive - I hit ALT +F9 and all the hyperlinks became visible.  I found that the hyperlinks were "absolute" (i.e. they included the full path to the pictures).  Since the thumb drive was a different path.  Word couldn't hyperlink to the pictures anymore.

Here's my point...  In Word, I could globally edit the hyperlinks just as easily as I could globally edit a document.  All I had to do was to globally delete the portion of the address and leave only the filenames of the pictures.  With that done, I hit ALT +F9 again to toggle off the text showing the hyperlinks and the pictures were once more accessible.  My other hyperlinks within the document itself were unaffected.

In Acrobat I can't find any way to get it save the links without inserting the full path - which, of course, changes every time I copy the folder to another medium.  Worse, I can't find any way to edit the hyperlinks as I was easily able to do in Word.  Can Adobe take a cue from Microsoft and provide at least a way to edit hyperlink pathnames?

(Or have they already done it and I'm just too ignorant to know how to do it).  As it stands, there's no convenient way to share my document - Different versions of Word paginate differently, and screw up the formatting,  so Acrobat was supposed to be my workaround to that problem.

Another vote for relative paths for Indesign hyperlinks.

I need to distribute a final PDF on CD-ROM that links to all sorts of files (Word docs, images, other PDF's, Excel files, etc...). If InDesign had relative links when I export to a PDF, I could put the CD on any computer and the links would work fine. Now I have to relink every link in Acrobat everytime there is an edit, no matter how simple. What a waste of valuable time.

I'm amazed that, this many years later, this simple feature request still hasn't been addressed. It isn't terribly confusing. "Relative" and "Absolute" are just two different methods for locating a referenced resource. More specifically, the difference is simply in where ID begins looking for the resource. Although they are both so simple, it would be easy to impliment the feature as a per-document (or even per-link) option.

Example:

This document:

/archive/project/document.indd

Contains a link to this resource:

/archive/project/images/photo.psd

Imagine that we save the entire contents of the project folder on a network drive (or check it into a versioning system, or whatever), and the location on that computer becomes:

/main/project/

Absolute:

When ID opens document.indd and encounters the link, it sees this information: /archive/project/images/photo.psd and it begins searching for photo.psd from the root. So it asks "Is there a folder in /  named archive?". If it can't find the folder so it begins a sort of convoluted process of searching in other places (read previous posts to learn more about how). Suffice it to say that ID's process will fail to locate photo.psd due to the fact that the project/ folder is located in a folder named something other than archive/.

Relative:

If ID would implement relative linking, it would see the information ../images/photo.psd when it encounters the link and begin searching from the folder where document.indd currently resides. So it begins looking in the project/ folder and, it doesn't care what the name of the parent folders are.

I also just realized how much I would love to have a relative link option in InDesign.  I've learned to deal with the packaging idea, but it kind of unorganizes my files... Here's my scenario:

I have a custom media kit I make for many clients, based on a template. There are many many elements involved so I have subfolders under my assets folder (which is my name for links) for each section.  If I package it, all subfolders are lost and all links are stuck in one folder, making it very hard to navigate to what I need to change.  If I could drag the file and assets subfolder to the new clients name, keeping my subfolder organized, it would be much easier to just open the files in the new location, change them, and have inDesign update the links.  As it stands now, if I did that, inDesign would  still pull from the original folder and I would have to relink everything to the new folder.

It's not a matter of packaging not being able to solve the problem, the issue is that I find it much more of a hassle and much more time consuming that way, when relative links just seem more intuitive in this case.  Not to mention, it takes a lot more time to open the doc, package, and find the new place, rather than the simple drag and drop idea. 

I think having the option to have links be relative or absolute would help me out GREATLY.  I am sure there are others in my position.