Linking to within a PDF using named destinations

[_Gloria_Mc_]

This topic is moved from the Feature Request forum. Leslie and Errol wrote:
We're talking about make a large manual that consists of many PDF files arranged in a hierarchy. It begins with an HTML file where the user chooses a topic that takes them to a PDF file that serves as a table of contents. The user then chooses a specific topic. Here's the issue. The specific topic is NOT always the first page of the corresponding PDF. Named destinations are set correctly. If you open the TOC PDF in Adobe (and not the IE plugin of Adobe) the links work correctly to the appropriate destinations. If however, you follow the links from the original HTML file, it uses the Adobe plugin inside IE. The links to the destinations DO NOT work in this case - it only takes you to the first page of the PDF on the topic, NOT the specific destination within the document.

The problem is described here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=326332

We're looking for a workaround. The new version of Adobe Reader 8 does the same thing. We can't use another browser because the manual is set for mass distribution in a corporate environment and changing the destinations to page number works, but it's endless amounts of data entry.

Any ideas??? We were thinking maybe using an eBook reader that opens PDFs instead of IE?

Your help would be much appreciated.
Leslie and Errol.

[midlo]

David--Your tip about using just # instead of #nameddest= works well. Thanks.

David & Gloria--I did a quick test of putting a hyperlink for named dest in a FM file. I see what you mean now. At least I see the result in the PDF destinations. I probably won't have time to test further until next year. Thanks a bunch!

I don't know why I continue to be surprised at how poorly the user info for FM and Acrobat is integrated. Just a sentence or two in the help of both would've saved me a few hours on this, back when. I wonder if their product managers ever meet.

[_David_Fass_]

I see Adobe as being very similar to Microsoft. They have a dominant product like Frame or Acrobat, and they just sit on it. Bugs persist for years and years. Requested features are never implemented. I doubt Frame 8 is much different than Frame 5. Over the past 10 years, has Frame evolved at all? The version I used in 1997 was essentially identical to the version I am using right now. If FrameMaker was produced by a two-person company (two people who cared about their product), it would be vastly better than it is. With one week of work, they could make it vastly better than it is. Alas. Corporate software.

[_Gloria_Mc_]

Richard,
How are you creating the the TOC and the destinations (in which program - Frame, Word, Acrobat, or ?) Also, which versions of Acrobat Professional (8.1.1?), etc. do you have?

Acrobat has historically had problems in this area, whether the links are bookmarks (in the bookmark pane), in the text going to a page, or linking to a destination. It has to do with the zoom (page display will obviously show the page), the page display (must be continuous), and how the link is defined. Bad news is that I've never figured it out myself.

One thing I've discovered is that acc. to Acrobat Help, links to destinations should be defined as Go To A Page View action, not Execute a Menu Item action. (Acrobat says the Go To A Page View action "Jumps to the specified destination in the current document or in another document.") However, even if I modify the Action for a link, it remains Execute a Menu Item (which is Go to page, the key word being "page"). A bug? (Or something I'm not doing correctly?)

Another thing I've noticed is that Acrobat is not good at identifying pages when you are scrolling near the bottom. You can see this yourself if you scroll near the bottom of a page, that the page number jumps to the next page number when approximately 25% of the prev. page is visible (if zoom is 100%, anyway). Thus, to set a destination for a heading low on a page, you can only scroll to the point before the page number jumps. Hope that makes sense.

Sorry I don't have a solution for you. Hope that someone else who has figured this out will speak up.

--GMc

[_Richard_B_Stevens_]

Gloria

Thanks for the reply. I was creating the destinations and hyperlinks in Acrobat. As you explain in the second to last para the problem is that the page number jumps to the next page when the view is about 3/4 of the way down the previous page. This is a bug. I have worked around it as you describe but this does mean the hyperlink jumps to different positions on different pages - an annoying inconsistency.

Richard

[_Stefan_Hoersting_]

Richard

To define the named destinations at the correct place you first need to set the page layout to 'single page', 'continuous' works for displaying but not for defining.

Then you resize the height of the window displaying your pdf inside Acrobat (not the Acrobat main window) so that it can display the place near the bottom of the page where you want the destination to be without jumping to the next page.

Make sure you didn't scroll to that view, but navigated there via keyboard keys or scroll bar. Otherwise Acrobat won't catch the right position. If you did scroll there, click into the page once.

Now create a named destination and link to it. The link should now point to the correct position in continuous page layout, too.

Unfortunately this doesn't solve the problem entirely, since text positioning and scroll raster don't allow for exactly the same distance from the top of the window to a given text. You can work around this too by toying with the window size, but that is a very annoying task.

Stefan

[_Graham_Lewis_]

How do I create a named destination in Word?

[gkaiseril]

You can only create a named destination an Acrobat. But you can creat links to document strtuctures within Word.

[_Michael_Leppo_]

Is it possible to use both a nameddest and a search term? specifically I want to be able to have a link point to the nameddest and from there start the search term highlighting..
the syntax i'm using is #nameddest=heading&search=term
it works but it seems to goto the nameddest then the search starts from the top, so if the term is found higher up, it doesn't work right, -any ideas?

[_Gloria_Mc_]

Graham,
You can include a PRINT field in Word that will instruct Acrobat to create the named destination when the file is PDF'ed. You can include these PRINT fields for any point in the file where you want a named destination. The PRINT field is in this form:

{PRINT "[ /Dest /MyDest /DEST pdfmark"}

where "MyDest" is the destination name you want.

This code is pdfmark, which is a PostScript-language extension that describes features that are present in PDF, but not in standard PostScript. It is a language that the Acrobat Distiller understands and will correctly render when it creates a PDF file.

To work with PRINT fields in Word, you must have the option "Show field codes instead of their values" selected. (I find it helpful to have field shading turned on, too.) Note that you can insert one PRINT field, then copy/paste it at other destinations and change the destination name accordingly. Also, the default for inserting a PRINT field is to have the option "Preserve formatting during updates" selected. This option yields "\* MERGEFORMAT" at the end of your printing instructions in the field. If that bugs you, do not select that option when you insert the field.

Hope this helps! --GMc

[_Pantagrool_]

Just solved this issue for my wife's company. The problem with her files was that there were extra spaces at the end of the destination names. I just deleted these extra spaces within the Destinations section of the PDF and they appear to be working now.

Pantagrool

[_John_Case_]

Has anybody solved the issue of named destinations 'sticking'? I am working on an internal web application with help links that open up a PDF file in a separate browser window. Each page of the application links to a different named destination within the PDF. The named destinations work perfectly the first time the user clicks on the help link. The problem we are having is if the user scrolls the PDF, then closes the help popup, and then clicks the same help link again, the PDF will popup to the last position the user was looking at.

We have found that if the user clicks on a different help link (different named dest) and then goes back to the first one, the first one will then open up at the right spot.

I am assuming this is some kind of browser caching issue. I have recreated it in both IE6 and Firefox2.

Does anybody have any solutions?

[_Matthias_S__]

Hi everybody,

the point with the Print Field Gloria mentioned sounds very interesting. But I want to add destination names in an automatic way, when the word document is transformed into the pdf file.
I need the headlines and section names to be transformed into destination names. Currently that works good for the creation of bookmarks, but I want to address these headlines using an URL like: testDoc.pdf#Headline1

Does anybody has an idea how that could be realised?

thx,
Matthias

[_Gloria_Mc_]

John,
I'm not sure which vers. of Acrobat you have, but the prob. you describe exists in Acrobat 7 (7.0.9) and 8.0. Our research/testing indicated that it didn't occur in Acrobat 6 and does not occur in 8.1.1. So if you are running 7 or 8.0, your prob. is an Acrobat bug and you need to upgrade to 8.1.1 or later.

While there is a slight caching issue with 8.1.1, it is very minor, and not something a user would normally encounter; they typically won't close the browser and <i>immediately</i> click the Help button again. It really is only a second or two and the caching prob. is gone - we don't think our users will be closing/clicking that quickly.

Matthias,
There is a product that purports to convert bookmarks to named destinations automatically for you -- check into AutoBookmark plug-in by Evermap. Don't know anything about it personally other than what their website says, "AutoBookmark plug-in provides automation tools that allow quick generation of named destinations from bookmarks and links." See http://www..evermap.com/autobookmark.asp, and let us know what your experience is!

[_Matthias_S__]

Gloria,

thank you very much for this hint. I have searched for days now to find exactly that kind of tool.
I tried the Trail Version and what it does is: It creates named destinations out of bookmarks. And because the sections are bookmarked when converting a word document into a pdf file that works fine for me.

Thx again,
Matthias

P.S. Small literal error in Gloria's link. Here is the correct one: http://www.evermap.com/autobookmark.asp

[_Matthias_S__]

One problem I notices when addressing the generated destination names using a URL was the following.

Destination Names in URLs are not allowed to contain space characters (" "). That's a problem when addressing to headlines that contain them. But the AutoBookmark plug-in provides a feature to rename the bookmarks before generating the destination names.
(Just as a hint.)

[_Gloria_Mc_]

Matthias,
Thanks much for letting us know how AutoBookmark works. I may try it one day!
Regards,
--Gloria

[_MariaMatos-Burns_]

Hi John,

I'm trying to do the samething you are. What is the command being used within the html to have a popup display a specific section within a pdf?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best Regards,
Maria

[_Gloria_Mc_]

Maria,
Here is a delayed response to your email. Did you find the information earlier in this thread? The html is a standard reference (href) pointing to www.mysite/mypath/mypdf.pdf#mydestination. The "popup" is the Internet Browser displaying the PDF.

[_Wayne_Erfling_]

I don't have Acrobat or a PDF authoring tool, but I'd like to create links to specific destinations within PDFs that I have received from vendors.

How can I view the names of the named destinations within a PDF file? I looked around for a shareware tool or even a paid one but haven't found one yet, and haven't found a way to view the named destinations from Adobe Reader 8.1.

I've also experienced a problem using "page=" from a Windows command shell command (that is, Internet Explorer is not involved).

The first time I issue the command with /A pagenum=dd, the document is opened and Reader 8.1 goes to the correct page.

If I then issue another command with a different page number, while the document is already open, Reader brings its window to the front on the screen but IGNORES page=, instead showing the document at the same position (that is it ONLY brings things to the front and does nothing else).

This is similar to some of the problems discussed on this thread.

Can I expect a fix for this problem?

Thanks!

[_Wayne_Erfling_]

(empty message so that I can be sure I checked the "Subscribe" checkbox: sorry!)

[_David_Fass_]

Hi Wayne. You can use Acrobat Standard or Pro (not Reader) to view Named Destinations. Open the document and select 'View' > 'Navigation Panels' > 'Destinations'.

I don't understand the rest of what you are trying to do from the command line, so I will leave it for someone else to answer.

-- Dave

[_Wayne_Erfling_]

Clarification of what I'm trying to do.

I'm trying to "launch" a (170 page) PDF from another tool via a command-line command or url, so that I can cross-reference various bookmarks and not need to search for them all the time but rather go directly to them.

Therefore I asked how I, as the user of the PDF file, can VIEW the named destinations with "some tool", so that I can set up the necessary command-line commands or urls, as I am not the author and do not have Acrobat myself.

[_Aandi_Inston_]

>Therefore I asked how I, as the user of the PDF file, can VIEW the named destinations with "some tool",

"Some tool" = Adobe Acrobat. No, I know that isn't the answer you
want.

Aandi Inston

[_David_Fass_]

Sorry, I did not understand. Other than buying or borrowing Acrobat Standard, I do not have any ideas for you, sorry. -- Dave

[steve_foxall]

Might be worth checking if NitroPDF can do it.