Links are not always about going to particular places. In fact, links can be pretty powerful because of the number of actions that you can associate to a link. Let me show you what I mean.
I’m going to select the Link tool. I’m going to drag Select Over this Text and I’m going to create for myself a secret, hidden Print button that when I click will print the document. In this case, I’m going to choose Custom Link. I’m going to leave it as an invisible rectangle, and I’m going to select Next. The action that I want for the link is to execute a menu item that’s selected here, I could choose from among the others but, so I’m going to leave it selected and click Add. Acrobat now wants me to tell it which menu item to choose. So I’ll choose File Print and click OK. Click OK to jump out of the Link dialogue box. Use the hand tool to test the link and when I click this, it will actually open the Print dialogue box, as if I had chosen Print from the File menu.
Again, this is another way to create an application-like experience within the PDF file because the person who you send this to might not be a person who understands how to use the Print functionality from Acrobat correctly, or this might be something that you can use for yourself as a way to create as I said, a secret hidden button that does something that you want it to do. I’m going to hit Cancel because I don’t want to print.
However, to continue with the concept of customizing a link, I’m actually going to add something to this because I want to point out that if I double click on a link and open its Actions Pallet, the actions that I use, I don’t have to just use a single action. I can use more than one. So before I execute the menu item of Print, I also want to save the PDF file. So I’ll click Add one more time, and choose File Save As. The Save As action is something that I want to have performed first so I’ll select it and move up and click OK. Go back to the hand tool so that I can test the link and what will happen here is I’ll click, it will ask me what I’d like to save the document as, and I’m just going to toss this one to the Desktop and click Save. And then it will open the Print dialogue box.
So a link that you create doesn’t need to have simply one action. You can pile action after action after action on top of the links and create, like I said, a very good customer experience, or even a miniature application from within your PDF file. Again, I hit Cancel because I really don’t want to print this document.
To this point, when we’ve created links within or to other PDF files, we’ve used the Zoom tool as a way to determine where the end user goes, so if I want you to go here, I can create a link that takes you here by simply zooming in and setting the link that way, and I’ll zoom back out. Instead of doing it this way, I’m going to use what I called Named Destinations, and Named Destinations are a good way to be very consistent about the place that the link takes you. For example, in this case I have a proposal. It’s the first page of the proposal and what I want to do is use this as the home page. If I open up the Pages Pallet here, you can see that I have a series of pages that follow, each of which has a Home button on it. Now this actually isn’t a Home button, it’s just a little graphic that happens to look like a Home button. We’re going to convert it into a real button with the Link tool. So I’ll select the Link tool, I’ll click and drag over the button and let go. The action that I want for the link is to go to a page view, and I’m just going to click Next and Set Link. Now this button really doesn’t do anything right now, but it will actually take you right to this page which isn’t a very useful button. But I’m just kind of warming it up, getting it set in place because I’m going to use it with another concept called a Named Destination. Into this document I have built a Named Destination that takes you to a place called Home. That Home is the first page of the document. And I’ll zoom out on this just so we can see the entire document. When I click the button, this is where I want the user to go no matter where they are on these pages that have the Home button, I want them to jump right to this page.
So to create a Named Destination, I went to the View, Navigation Panels, Destinations Panel and here we have our destinations. There is already a destination here called Home, so to use the destination, and I’ll simply return to the page where I placed the link, double click the link to edit it, open its Actions, click the Action, edit the Action, and here in this Edit Actions dialogue box, I’m going to, instead of going to a page number, I’m going to select Use Named Destination. Anytime you’re linking to a document that has Named Destinations in it, all you need to do is click browse and all of the Named Destinations will appear. So I’ll click OK, OK again, OK a third time and let’s test it. I’ll take the Hand tool. I’ll click on Home and it takes me to that destination.
What’s nice about this is that if you’re working through a document, let’s say you want to have some buttons that take you to this Home destination, if you use the Linking tool the way we previously used it, and you hardwired the destinations into it, then you’ll have to remember where this concept of Home was. With a Named Destination, if I were to take this page and move it somewhere else in the page order, the destination would still point at this, and so I can continue to create buttons after I move the page by pointing them to the Named Destination and not really worry where that destination points. I know that it’s pointing to the right content, because the destination is associated with that particular page no matter where it happens to be.
Let’s do one last thing with Named Destinations, because I want to point out that you can actually point to another file, and if that file has Named Destinations in it, you can use the link to point to another file and point to a Named Destination in that other file. So let’s start by opening up another file that we want to point to. You’ll find it in the Lesson Seven folder. It’s called Time to Treasure and we’ll open it up. And you’ll see that there are already Named Destinations built into this file for you. I’m going to go ahead and create another one though, just so we can have one. I’m going to zoom in on Custom Com and I’m going to create a New Destination and will call it Contact. Hit Enter to accept it and we’re good. Now I want to save this and I’m going to undoc this document and move it over to the side. Let’s jump back to our link file, here it is. We’re going to produce a link. We’re going to point to that other file and then we’re going to edit that link. So let’s start with the link and what I want to do is just create a secret little button down here that I can use for Contact information, and we’re going to go to a Page View. So I’ll click Next, but before I set the link, now I’m going to go to the Window Menu, open up the Time to Treasure document and set the link. To fix the link so that it actually points to a particular destination, I’m going to go back ahead in the link, open it up, I’m going to select its action and you can see that it goes to a page in another document. But it goes to a page by number not to a destination, so I’ll edit the link. I’m going to Open in a New Window and I’m going to select Use Named Destination. When I browse, you can see that I have all of the Named Destinations including the Contact named destination that I created, select OK, OK, OK, and then before we test the link, I’ll go to the hand tool but I’m going to bring that other file open, and I’m just going to close it. Just so you know that there’s nothing up my sleeve. We’ll close it and there we go.
Now let’s test the link to see if it works. We’ll roll over the link that I placed, double click and Acrobat will open that second file, and to take me to that destination within that second file. That’s another great way to create a very modular set of documents that are designed to work together, because I can change the order of the pages, the number of the pages, the content on the pages and as long as I’m using Named Destinations, the original file that I’m linking from the place where I put the link in the first place isn’t going to have to change. It’s a very powerful tool.
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