Create relative links in PDFs - OpenOffice.org Ninja

Create relative links in PDFs

Posted by Andrew Z at Sunday, February 3, 2008 | Permalink

OpenOffice.org 2.4 introduces support for relative links in PDF documents.

Say you want to create a web of interconnected PDFs and distribute them via a web site, a CD-ROM, or an office file storage network. Each PDF is linked to the other. The absolute links to each PDF may change, but relatively they are the same.

Relative links

For example, you start out by publishing http://example.com/introduction.pdf which links to http://example.com/chapter1.pdf. Then, you move these PDFs to the directory http://example.com/book/ or S:\Book\. Relative links makes these tasks easier.

In other cases, relative links makes certain tasks possible. For example, if you put the documents on a CD-ROM for distribution, you don't know what the absolute paths may be. The directory could be d:\Book\, e:\Book\, /mnt/cdrom/ or something else.

How to use

  1. Write some text in a document.
  2. Highlight the text where you want the link.
  3. Click Format > Character > Hyperlink.
  4. In the URL field, type the relative name of the document such as chapter1.pdf.
    OpenOffice.org: Insert Character dialog
  5. Click OK to close the dialog.
  6. Click File > Export PDF.
  7. Click the Links tab.
  8. Check the box Export URLs relative to file system.
  9. Click the Export button.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Sirs !

i found you searching for ...

relative links in PDF export from Open Office

It works great in oo 2.4! You are genious !

Great for simple minds like me and my friends!

You can easily create websites in pdf
without this problem -> the hyperlink is overwritten with an local link at loading the dokument new. It worked before !

Anonymous said...

I just tried the above and every time (I have tried this a few times) the pdf comes out with an http://filename/

I am at a loss.

Spidy said...

I cannot find that feature in OpenOffice 3.0 please help me