HTML Help

aschouten · Joined: 15 Oct 2008 Posts: 2

I'm trying to link from a web page to a bookmark or specific page within a pdf document. Is it possible, if so - how?

PayneLess Designs · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 4289 Location: MS

Quote: You can't link to bookmarks in PDF. If you're accustomed to thinking of "bookmarks" in the sense that Microsoft Word uses the term, you'll need to make a few mental adjustments in Acrobat.

Adobe and MS use "bookmark" to mean different things. They're both something like a physical bookmark, a bit of paper you stick between the pages of a book to mark a place you want to return to later. But in Word, a bookmark is the place you want to remember, where in PDF, the bookmark is the paper you're marking your place with.

When you look at a bookmarked physical book, you see little slips of paper sticking out from between pages. When you view a bookmarked PDF, you see bits of text down the left side of the screen in the Bookmarks list.

Inside a PDF, a bookmark contains:

- The text of the bookmark - what you see in the bookmarks list

- A destination - the place you wanted to mark with the bookmark

The destination might be a specific page in the current PDF, it might be a named destination in the PDF or it might be some other action like a link to a URL on the web.

PDF's named destinations are pretty much the same thing as what Word calls bookmarks.

So in Word:

Bookmarks mark places you want to jump TO
You click Hyperlinks to jump to Bookmarks

In PDF:

Named Destinations mark places you want to jump TO
You click Bookmarks to jump to Named Destinations

That should help explain why you can't link to bookmarks in PDF. SOURCE

Other source:

Link to Bookmark in PDF on website

aschouten · Joined: 15 Oct 2008 Posts: 2

Thanks, I was hoping there was a way to insert an anchor into the pdf like you set a bookmark in adobe. It would be convenient if it were possible.

PayneLess Designs · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 4289 Location: MS

I think every one wished it was possible as it would indeed be a great convenience. Maybe one day.

smanning · Joined: 01 Apr 2009 Posts: 2

You can create a bookmark in a PDF, and then link to it from a web page just like you were linking to a named anchor in a web page:

http://yoursite.com/yourfile.pdf#yourbookmarkname

I'm doing it on a site I'm building right now, and have tested it successfully.

I noticed that it won't work if you create a named destination in the PDF with no corresponding bookmark.

The PDF was created in Acrobat 8.0.

PayneLess Designs · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 4289 Location: MS

smanning wrote: You can create a bookmark in a PDF, and then link to it from a web page just like you were linking to a named anchor in a web page:

http://yoursite.com/yourfile.pdf#yourbookmarkname

I'm doing it on a site I'm building right now, and have tested it successfully.

I noticed that it won't work if you create a named destination in the PDF with no corresponding bookmark.

The PDF was created in Acrobat 8.0. I didn't see any proof of what you said on your site! Just advertising it or can you provide more info such as code and other links different from the links I gave already.

smanning · Joined: 01 Apr 2009 Posts: 2

The URL I provided earlier is fictional. It's just an example of what the URL in your web site should look like, with dummy names - yoursite, yourfile, etc.

Here are the steps.

1. Using Acrobat, create a bookmark in your pdf and give it a name. Its name must follow the same rules as a named anchor in HTML, which basically means it cannot have any spaces in it.

2. Once you're done creating your bookmarks in the pdf, save the pdf and upload it to the web.

3. On your web page, create a link. The link must point to the URL of the pdf file, plus a pound sign #, plus the name of your bookmark. It follows this pattern: http://sitename/filepath/filename.pdf#bookmarkname

The site I'm working on has not been deployed to production yet, so it's not visible to the outside world, but I'll post the URL once it is.

PayneLess Designs · Joined: 28 Feb 2007 Posts: 4289 Location: MS

Thank you. That's a lot more instruction to the Original Poster than what you gave. Now we wait to see if he tries it and it works. Named anchors work just fine, but from web link to embedded PDF link may have its problems.

A lot of that info was given in my links posted earlier about this very same thing.

leadpipes · Joined: 13 Jan 2010 Posts: 1

Hi,

I haven't gotten the bookmark or nameddest links to work yet - possibly due to how those elements were created in the doc I'm targeting and not knowing their correct names, but linking to a specific page number works fine, at least in IE (having some issues in Firefox which replaces %20 in URLs with spaces for some reason).

Format to link to e.g. page 24 in file mydoc.pdf is:
http://www.mysite.com/mydoc.pdf#page=24

That's it!
You can even open the doc to a specific view layout, omit Acrobat toolbar, etc.
For more info see infohttp://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf#page=5