Think PDF and Links! OpenOffice.org Might Be Your One-Stop Shop for Documents You Distribute (Repost)

Note: This blog has two related posts, on PDF in general and on Impress and links. Originally posted January 2006.

 

I'm going to make a bold statement. If you ever put any documents on the web, you might need only one application in your life: OpenOffice.org.

I'm not talking web design—I'm just saying, if you work for the city government and need to post long pages of forms for people to download, or if you need to publish reports that people can easily find their way around in, or if you're a technical writer and create user manuals with the usual thousands of links within the document and to other documents—you might be good to go with only OpenOffice.org.

What Makes Me Think OpenOffice.org Is Such a Great Publishing Tool?

This is because of three things.

1. In OpenOffice.org, you can create links. You can just type "Click here to go to the web page," select some text, and link it to any web site you want.

You can link any text or graphic to any heading, graphic, table, etc. within your document or within another OpenOffice.org document. (You can link to another PDF document, but not to another bookmark within a PDF document.)

You can automatically generate a linked table of contents, so that anyone clicking on an item in the TOC is taken directly to that heading in the document.

You can put links in headers and footers. Have a link that says "Back to top" that appears in your footer, and you've got great navigation.

2. You can make a PDF document from your OpenOffice.org document. From a Writer text document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, or Draw drawing, with OpenOffice.org. Just choose File > Export as PDF. Or even easier, just click the PDF icon on your Standard toolbar.

3. In OpenOffice.org 2.0, the links you make in OpenOffice.org transfer over to and work in the PDF.

These are all very important and useful. Put'em together and you have huge power.

What You Need to Do in Your OpenOffice.org Document

Take a look. Here's a document I made using only OpenOffice.org, created the linked TOC automatically and the links between sections manually using only OpenOffice.org, and generated the PDF using only OpenOffice.org. Here's what I did in the document--I didn't do a huge amount of cross-references but I did do enough to demonstrate the power, I hope.

A. There's a table of contents that I generated automatically, and made hotlinked to each section, automatically. Click on a link in the TOC and it goes.

To create a hotlinked table of contents, in your Writer document choose Insert > Indexes and Tables  > Indexes and Tables. To make the hotlinks, click the Entries tab of the window, click to the left of the E and click Hyperlink, and click after the E and click Hyperlink again. Click All to put hyperlinks on all levels of the TOC. Click OK.

Click this image to see a larger version.

B. At the fine, innovative suggestion of Dave Richards of the City of Largo, I put a link in the footer that says “back to top.” This text is linked to the Table of Contents heading so that clicking that link in the footer takes you to the table of contents.  You could also add footers that say and link to "back to whatever you want." You could add headers and link them back to the original Head1. You could add a manual link at the end of any major or minor section to go back to the beginning of that heading.

To turn on the footer, choose Format > Page, click the Footer tab, mark the Footer checkbox, click OK. Then click in the footer text box that appears and click OK.

Click this image to see a larger image if you want.

Type the text you want in the footer text box.

How the heck do you make the link now that you're in the footer or header? That's next. To link an item in a header, footer, or anything else, see the next point.

C. I added links at the beginning, and to any interesting web sites, throughout the document, using the Hyperlink icon on the Standard toolbar.  Links such as "This section covers the following topics" with a bulleted list containing three links.

      Click this image to see a larger image if you want.

  Here's how to create a manual link to a web site, other point in the document, etc. Select the text that you want linked. Click the Hyperlink icon on the Standard (top) toolbar.

In the window that appears, think about what kind of link you want to make. To link to a web site, just click the Internet icon on the left, and type the URL. Click Apply.

To link within the document, click the Document icon on the left side. Then click the round stopsign type icon by the Target in Document field, and you get the navigator. In the navigator window, you can link to any heading, table, object, etc. in your document, or in any other document.

Click this image to see a bigger image if you want.

Note: You'll see that Headings, the TOC, and also other objects like tables and bookmarks show up. You can link to any of them.

• Headings are anything to which you have applied Heading1 paragraph style through Heading10 paragraph style. More specifically, it's whatever is set as the headings under Tools > Outline Numbering.
  
• You can click anywhere and insert a bookmark by choosing Insert > Bookmark and naming it. Then all those bookmarks automatically show up in the Navigator list and you can link to them.

Select the item to link to.

Click Apply.

Click Close.

Once you're back in the Hyperlink window, click Apply again. The same text, a little technical looking, will show up in the Text field at the bottom of the page. This is the text that will appear in the document.

If you want something different to appear in your document, just retype it and click Apply

Then click Close. You'll see the text in the document, linked to the item you selected.

With those three attributes, you can make a document that's extremely useful.

Exporting to PDF

The final step, once you do all this in OpenOffice.org, is to export to PDF.

Choose File > Export to PDF. Name the file. In the PDF options window, specify a page range if you want, and make any changes to the graphics quality. (If you can, keep the JPG compression as high as possible.) Then click Export.

Here's the PDF Options window.Click it to see a larger version if you want. BE SURE TO SELECT THE "TAGGED PDF" OPTION to make the links convert to links in the PDF document.

Click Export, name the document, and you're done.

Take that PDF copy of your document and post it to your web site, email it to whoever needs it, or just do whatever needs to be done to distribute it to the folks who need it.

Think Links and Think PDF! It reduces repetitive work, gives you and your organization extra powers, and will make you look very cool when you introduce this slick, labor-saving approach to distributing documents.

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Comments

[Kaustav]

How do I create a PDF using OO from commandline???
I want commandline options for PDF creation in OO.

[Solveig]

Hi Kaustav,

I believe you need a macro to do this. See this topic on converting word to PDF which I think should work.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=3772

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=3525

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=12757

You can also batch convert files to PDF using the Web Wizard. See http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/02/our_pdf_prince_.html

Solveig

[Parminder]

The pdf conversion is absolutely great. Is there any way to create fillable pdf forms using Openoffice.

[Cheski]

Hi Solveig,

I am doing a feasability study now to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice or StarOffice.

I also saw that the PDF creation with links is a big plus and may even eliminate the need for Adobe Acrobat, which could save us a lot of money as well.

Just a small question: Is there any way I can have the PDF I just generated open up in Acrobat Reader when it's done to see the result?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Regards and keep up the great work!

Cheski,
Switzerland

[Solveig]

Hi Parminder,

I don't think that there's a fillable form feature in the OpenOffice PDF features. Sounds like a good opportunity for an ambitious open source programmer, though. ;>

Solveig

[Solveig]

Hi Cheski,

>> Just a small question: Is there any way I can have the PDF I just generated open up in Acrobat Reader when it's done to see the result?

I don't know of one; it sounds like perhaps a small shell script of some sort, in the operating system, would do that if you can have your PDFs going to a few specified directories. Just a guess, though.

Solveig

[maggie]

A set of conversion tools to convert PDF documents into other popular formats.

http://www.sharewarecheap.com/business-finance-word-processing/pdf-export-kit5160-35.htm

[Rodney]

How do I remove the grey shading behind the hyperlink in a Calc Spreadsheet?

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Rodney,

Gray shading won't print, so you don't need to remove it. However, if you choose View > Field Shading, that should hide it.

To remove the hyperlinked attribute, you can select the text and choose Format > Default.

Solveig

[Rodney]

Hi, I appreciate the help, but there is no Field Shading option in a Calc Spreadsheet.
So is there any other way to remove the gray shading or possible change the color to make it invisible in a Calc Spreadsheet.

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Rodney,

I've just been fiddling with Calc and I can't even get URLs to show up gray, period. Not sure what's up. Try going under Tools > AutoCorrect, Options tab, and unmark the URL Recognition checkmark.

Then try the Format > Default Formatting, and try reopening OpenOffice.org as well.

Solveig

[Roberto]

How can I make a linked TOC with OO 2.1? I read your post but I can´t find E# and LS buttons in the new OO version?

Best regards

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Roberto,

Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables, Entries tab. Click to the left of the first entry in the Structure area and click Hyperlink, then again to the right of what you want hyperlinked and click Hyperlink again.

[Hugo]

I am trying to create the Hiperlinks as explained above in the table of contents with OO 2.2, but it does not appear linked. Do I need to convert into PDF to see the links, or anything has changed with version 2.2.Thanks

[Hugo]

I am trying to create the Hiperlinks as explained above in the table of contents with OO 2.2, but it does not appear linked. Do I need to convert into PDF to see the links, or anything has changed with version 2.2.Thanks

[Solveig]

Hi Hugo,

In the TOC setup window, in the Entries tab, be sure to select the default character style for the hyperlinks in the Character Style list. It's Hyperlink or something very close. Also be sure to click hyperlink twice, once before some text to get the LS indicator and once to get the LE indicator after the text.

The links should function correctly in the doc and the PDF.

Solveig

[Hugo]

Hi again Solveig,

I have tried the default character style, which I found as "default" and it does not work either. I have both hiperlinks, before and after the entry set. I include the entries by selecting text and doing edit->Index Entry adn adding to the table of contents. Is that correct? Any idea of my mistake?Thanks !

[Bruce Button]

I have hyperlinked a sound file (mp3) in on OOo document and would like the link to be preserved in the conversion to pdf. As far as I can see, the conversion only preserves links to other documents. I really need the links to be relative as well (so that I can put the document and supporting files on a CD, etc.). Is this possible?

Thanks

[Solveig]

Hi Bruce,

I don't think PDF would work, if it's not working when you export and select the Tagged PDF checkbox when you export. You might try exporting to Macromedia Flash or to HTML instead.

Solveig

[Bruce Button]

Hi Solveig,

Thanks for your reply. I am able to accomplish the required results exporting from MS Word to Adobe using the Adobe pdf converter, but it would be nice if I could do this in OpenOffice as well. Apart from the OpenOffice exporter, Adobe only offers a printer driver that works in OpenOffice and this doesn't preserve the links properly.

Thanks again
Bruce

[Rob Fleming]

I'm trying to add hyperlinks to a table of contents generated by OO from a newsletter produced originally in Word. The table comes up fine, but no hyperlinks. Even if I use the original Word TOC, which had working hyperlinks, I get nada. I can create a document from scratch, generate a TOC, and the links work. I even tried changing all the imported styles in the Word document to native OO Heading styles. Zilch. This is very frustrating because I was excited about being able to export working internal hyperlinks to a PDF for distribution. ANy thoughts? Thanks.

[Rob Fleming]

OK, the advice to a previous query which I hadn't seen fixed the hyperlink problem when I made sure that the E box was formatted for "Internet Link". Now my twin problem is that, when I reformat the TOC to be two columns, I lose all the hyperlinks. The TOC generator does not convert manual returns (in the topic headings) to spaces, so I have to change them. I don't find any way to do a Global Search and Replace on special characters (like manual return or even paragraph) in OO. Is there such or is it coming Real Soon Now in 2.4? Many thanks for the column. I got your book, but it doesn't answer everything.

[Rob Fleming]

Oops, not as successful as I thought. The TOC entries LOOK like hyperlinks (blue, underlined) but don't link. I tried starting an OO Writer document from scratch and could make the TOC and Hyperlinks work only for Heading 1 items (I need three layers of headings). I can manually, individually, install bookmarks in each Heading 3 item and hyperlinks from the TOC entry, but that's a lot of work the computer should be able to do. Arghhhh!

[Solveig]

Hi Rob,

You've pointed out something I need to add that is no longer a default. When you choose File > Export to PDF, thenin the big options window, first tab, choose Tagged PDF. This means, make the links into links in the PDF doc. not very obviously labeled, I know. ;>

Re the searching and replacing for carriage returns, it's in this blog. Click the Writer category at the right side of the blog, wait an eternity for it to load, then search for "Carriage return" on the page.

I could have sworn I put it in the book, I'll check. Definitely something that should be in the book if it's not.

Solveig

[Laura]

So ... will OO work to take a Microsoft Word file, hyperlink within the text (table of contents, etc.) and allow affiliate links to other websites (like Amazon) and then upload everything into Adobe Acrobat Distiller if I already have Adobe Acrobat?

If so, are there things I need to keep in mind? Will people be able to open the links in Adobe Reader? I'm not that technical, but I'd like to get my ebook out soon, and it would make it a lot more user friendly if people could link directly to recommended products and websites.

Thanks for your input!
Laura