Adding Links to an Acrobat Page
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One could argue—in fact, I’m going to do so right now—that the most significant addition to how we read text in the modern era is the hyperlink, an active area on the page that, when clicked with a mouse or touched with a finger, causes something to happen. Most links send you to somewhere: another page of the document, another website, but the possible actions a link can invoke are myriad and various.
A modern electronic document is not an island; it is part of the Greater World of Information, connected to that world through its hyperlinks.
This is hardly new, of course.
Here’s something you perhaps don’t know: It’s easy to add links to your own PDF document pages. Your PDF links can send the users to other pages in the document, view a web page, play a movie, and do any of a wide range of other activities. All you need is Acrobat X and—well, that’s all you need, really. And a little practice.
Let’s see how it’s done.
Our Sample File
First, let’s look at the file we’re going to be editing and discuss what we’ll do with it. As always, this sample file is available on the Acumen Training Resources page; look for “MakingLinks.zip.” You can download this file and follow along as we go, or just read on for the sheer joy of the prose.
The file is an advertisement for a training company called Acumen Training. (In the spirit of full disclosure, prompted by my large bank of lawyers, I point out that Acumen Training actually exists; it’s what I do when I’m not writing for Peachpit.com.)
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Figure 1 We are going to add links to this PDF advertisement.
We are going to add three links to this page:
- A link to the disclaimers page, which is the second page of the PDF file (Figure 2).
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Figure 2 The second page of our PDF file is a Disclaimers page; this will be the target for the links on the first page.
- A link on the disclaimers page that takes the reader back to the ad’s first page.
- A link to the Acumen Training website, just in case the reader needs to sign up for a course or six.
We’ll start by making the link to the Disclaimers page and, in so doing, we’ll learn the process by which links are born in Acrobat X.