OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: Think PDF and Links! How to create links and export them to create linked PDF documents (repost)

Note: This blog has two related posts, on PDF in general and on Impress and links. Also note that the PDF editing feature in 3.0 (actually an extension, extensions.openoffice.org) makes the PDF features in OpenOffice.org even more amazing.

If you ever put any documents on the web, you might need only one application: 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.)

Tochyperlink 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.

Hyperlinkicon 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.

Comments

Hi Solveig,

Although you made a special effort to add the note on the October 2007 page to say that tags were essential for the PDF links to work, I have not needed the tags. I'm at a loss for what they're for (the OOo help says nothing).

( note: that the note is not present on the "permalink" to this page, which is still pointing back to the un-corrected January 2006 )

For example, I mimicked what your example was. I took one of my existing Writer odt documents (20 pages of headings, text, links and pictures) and added an automatic linked table of contents (about a dozen entries) (your great instructions were essential - thanks!). It already had manual links within the document, and numerous internet links to outside web sites. Then I exported as PDF two versions, once with the tag box check marked, once without the check mark.

The pdf file with tags wss nearly twice the size of the one without tagged pdf output, but the internal and external links and TOC worked perfect in the small one, too. What am I overlooking?

I'm using OOo 2.3 and Foxit free reader (smaller and faster than Adobe). Any chance that Adobe is what needs the tags? Or, any chance it was something that older OOo needed but newer OOo either doesn't need or does by default without needing that particular box being checked? Or, although you had a Writer example, is it Impress or Calc or Base that need it?

It would be great to get away with sending 500 K files instead of 1 Meg :) Thanks for your help.

Posted by: Bill | October 31, 2007 at 08:44 PM

Hello again Solveig. I did find more on "pdf tags" and I guess it's mostly for accessibly, so that screen readers (for the vision impaired) can have a better idea of the "text flow" and table and form layout. I guess that also is related to just what the TOC links point to, etc. I guess it will also help read and edit pdfs if they have tags in them -- an editing feature OOo may get some day.

From what I read, in some cases the pdf tags are legally required.

Thanks for the tip.

Posted by: Bill | November 07, 2007 at 06:36 PM

Your information is good.....

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