Linking to another Word document

[Jo]

I have been working on a series of chapters in a book, with each chapter in
different documents. I've created an index in a separate document, using a
concordance table and XE fields. This worked well.

Now the client wants to put the book online, with different chapters (or
even sections within the chapter) displayed in PDF files. I have been asked
to turn the index entries into hyperlinks, which will take the user to the
corresponding PDF document and also to the location of the word/phrase within
that document. I do not have access to Acrobat writer myself. Someone else
wants to do a straight conversion from Word into PDF documents. (Hence, I
can't just set up the links in Acrobat directly.)

As far as I can tell, the only way to link to a place in another Word
document is by using bookmarks. When I tried linking within the same
document, I could access heading styles, but apparently not when it's in a
different document. In that case I must use bookmarks, as far as I know.

So I guess the question is: Is there an easy way to convert my existing XE
fields into bookmarks, which could be linked to from the index document?

What about when there are multiple cases of an XE field referring to the
same word/phrase in the same document? As far as I know, each bookmark must
be unique.

Any ideas how this could be done? (Hopefully easily? ;-) Thanks for the help!

Jo

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Jo,

I think no one answered because this sounds like a big old hassle. Word does
not offer a hyperlinked index. Try googling for various ways people try to
work around it. There may be an add-in somewhere that will do this for you.

A possibility: use the trial version of Acrobat Pro (should be 30 days, I
assume) and add the hyperlinks to the index there.

However, what I really think--the client's request is a little silly. Often
when I see chapters online, it's possible to download the *entire* file as a
PDF, not each chapter. This is more functional to me than individual
chapters, plus it allows a hyperlinked TOC at the beginning of the PDF file.

If you expect people to be reading a long document while on the web, then
there is no point in converting to PDF. PDFing a long document is useful so
that one can download, read offline and at leisure, and (in my case), using
the standalone PDF viewer features to do things like search, zoom the text
larger, etc. These are things that are more difficult when a plug-in shows
the pdf in a browser window.

Under those conditions, a hyperlinked index that is per chapter sounds
totally idiotic. What if you download one chapter plus the index, but the
hyperlinked index tries to send you to a chapter you don't have? Just use a
single pdf doc.

It seems that the client wants a PDF doc that can hyperlink out of a pdf
browser plugin, download a new doc, and re-enter the pdf browser plug-in to
get to that place in another PDF file. No idea whether this is possible,
never seen it happen--AND, that's what the web is designed for, to leap
between different documents. Why try to turn pdf to this function when
there is already a better tool?

 

[Jo]

Thanks for your reply Daiya! I think I've given you the wrong impression in
some ways. The book is for the company's internal use only, as a
reference manual. They want to access it only through their internal network.
My understanding is that it won't be dowloaded in the sense of having access
to the document file offline. Also, the index is book-wide, not just for a
particular chapter.

I'm still learning what the client is looking for, what they want the end
result to look like, and how they want it to function. My current
understanding is that they want small PDF documents to be accessed through
HTML links. Whatever format the index winds up being, we may still need a way
to pull up a PDF sub-document and then position it at the requested section.

Good idea about looking for an add-in that might be helpful. Thanks for that.

Thanks for your help. I may post again after I've learned more about what
they're looking for.

Jo

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Jo,

In that case, I would say that regular web pages in HTML makes far more
sense than PDF. What you describe is what HTML is designed for--it's
especially good at small discrete chunks of text. It would be far more
powerful, and easier to maintain for the future, to use a website search to
find stuff in the document, rather than a hyperlinked index that needs to be
updated every time something changes.

I would try to get them to explain a good rationale for using PDF and not
HTML. If the use of this document assumes constant online access, then
there seems no reason to not use HTML. PDF stands for *Portable* Document
Format, and it's really designed to make it easy to transport and exchange
documents, and there's no transport happening in the scenario you describe.

My google for "hyperlinked index ms word" did turn up some possibly useful
tips, though.

You might try various searches to see if hyperlinking from a webpage to a
location *within* a PDF document is even possible, before you put too much
energy into this. The Adobe Acrobat forums might be a place to ask/search.
I have no idea, I just feel like I haven't seen it done.

The wikipedia page has some commentary on why PDF is not the best way to
distribute online content: ("PDF on the Web")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format