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TIP: Linking to a specific page
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Thursday, June 10, 2010
We hear this question a lot, so you'd think we'd have written about it by now!
Not infrequently, you might like to add a web link to a PDF file, but have a specific page appear instead of the first page when the PDF opens. This may be particularly useful for frequently-accessed reference documents, or documents including a large number of subsections.
No problem. Here's how it's done:
A link to <a href="http://www.MySite.com/MyFile.pdf#page=12">page 12</a>.
Basically, just add a “#page=n” to the end of your link targeting a PDF file. Make sure the “n” matches the desired PDF page number.
You can use a similar method to link directly to a Destination in a PDF file. See this Adobe Systems KnowledgeBase article for more information.
NOTE: This sort of link will only work for users who are opening PDF files in a web-browser plugin. It doesn't work from the desktop.
3rd Party Software Note: I have not tested all available web-browser plugins to assess support for this feature (I will be adding it to the next PDF Reader Review, rest assured). Adobe Reader has supported this very reasonable feature for a long time so the rest of 'em should as well (IMHO).
Comments
But what if the URL doesn't begin with "http:"? What if the PDF in question is on the same CD-ROM disk that contains the HTML-file in which the link is placed? We've found that the code
<a href="../PDFs/Cats.pdf#page=4">Cats</a>
shows up as hot-text that works fine as long as the entire suite of documents to be burned to CD is housed in (and opened in Internet Explore in) a folder on the desktop or a local hard-drive or a mapped network-drive. But the moment the suite is burned to CD and the HTML-file on the CD is opened and tested in Internet-Explorer, the resulting hot-text will not open "Cats.pdf" to the fourth page. It opens on the first page, insistently. How do we fix that?
P.S. -- I've noticed that if I change my CD-tray's Properties so that "Enable CD recording on this drive" is turned OFF, the problem reported above disappears. But we can't be sure that the party to whom we ship the CD will have THEIR CD-tray's Properties likewise configured, so this is not a durable solution.