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Is it possible to make hyperlinks really work when exporting to PDF?

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    • #58622
      Jttraverse
      Member

      I have a page showing a listing of illustrations in a book that I would like to link to the actual pages themselves, and have it work when I export to PDF. Maybe I'm just missing something fundamental, but following the steps in ID and instructions I've read elsewhere, it seems so simple…but still isn't working.

      I have tried the hyperlink method, which looked like exactly what I wanted. But when it's exported and I click the link in the PDF it errors out that it cannot find the file and shows that it's looking for the absolute path to the file on the hard drive. I tried it as a text anchor, linking to the page, and any other option I could think of, but simply cannot get it to link internally so that clicking on the text in the list will jump to the illustration page.

      I've seen comments that CS5 has some buggy issues with links, etc. exporting to PDF, but has anyone found how to do so it actually works. Am I going to have to export it and then take it into a PDF editor to make the links work…ug, just kill me now…

      Thanks,

      JTT

    • #58624
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      This is multiple docs in a book panel? If so, I find that in general I need to have all the documents open when I export the PDF from the book panel. Shouldn't have to, but it seems like each version of InDesign makes multi-document books more and more clunky, especially when it comes to hyperlinks, cross-references, etc.

    • #58626
      Jttraverse
      Member

      Hi David,

      I opened every chapter/doc in the book, including the pages with the illustrations, and went back and recreated the hyperlinks making them point to the pages they should. Choosing the page automatically updated the page number, so I thought everything was working. In fact, I was certain you had the right answer because with all of the documents open their names showed up in the list of documents to link too, which wasn't the case when I'd first tried.

      Unfortunately, exporting to PDF and then testing one of the links still gives an error “File not found”. More strange, it's looking for the full absolute path to where the file would be on the hard drive–but for the file name with a .pdf extension, as if it thinks the target should be the linked stand alone pdf document in the directory.

      For some reason it isn't generating internal links pointing to the document location, or even the page number, inside the exported pdf itself. There must be something I'm doing wrong if you have any other ideas. I don't want to believe InDesign is so kludgy in something done all the time in html.

      Thanks,

      JTT

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