Is there a way to maintain hyperlinks between books?

[techpubchick]

I have four books (Volumes 1-4) which contain cross-references (e.g. Volume 1 contains cross-references to Volume 2 Section 11). I am testing a master book containing the four book and seeing if the cross-references will remained hyperlinked but I won't know the result until tomorrow morning (each volume is almost 1000 pages containing hundreds of graphics) but I suspect the hyperlinks will remain intact. What is desired is that each Volume is a stand-alone file contained in the same folder. Is there a way to either generate a single PDF file of each volume when structured into a book? I did try the generate as individual files check box and what that did was generate each file inside each book as a stand-alone PDF which is not desired and did not complete the process.

The other thought is maybe I shouldn't be using cross-references. I can control: folder name the PDFs are located in and file names. Is there a way maybe I can "name" a spot in the text and then generate a URL? That might work for everything but the master frame generated TOC (contains all four volumes and is 146 pages long).

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you're on the right track...the PDF with all content will have live links, the individual PDFs won't link to each other.

You are also correct regarding your alternative path; hard coding links to a specific path will work.

[techpubchick]

Is there a tutorial or a "how to" on hard coding links? I actually have never done this in FrameMaker and I still want to use cross-referencing so the text will automatically update should it change. Also should have stated this is in structure framemaker and will I have to update the EDD to accept hard coding? 

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Here's a post to get you started. I also have it documented in FrameMaker - Working with Content

Inserting URL Links