Awesome tip.. thanks to Jon for the info! I’m putting this here so I don’t lose it.
In yesterday’s item I complained about the opaqueness of PDF files. As Mark Kunzmann pointed out (in email), the situation is less dire than I suggested. He illustrated by pointing me to page 100 of the government’s energy report here. I can point you to the page describing necessary URL syntax here. This scheme is workable, for large documents like the 170-page energy report, thanks to the same HTTP 1.1 byte-range technology that I’ve been using for random access to MP3 audio.
Thanks for the reminder, Mark. This falls into the category of things I used to know, but forgot. Now arguably, there’s a reason I forgot about it. You rarely (if ever) see PDF URLs ending with #page=6 in the wild. My feeling is that’s because a PDF page is an arbitrary unit of content, and it usually won’t precisely address the element you’d like to refer to.
Note that there’s also the #nameddest option, which works like an HTML fragment identifier and takes you to a specific location within a page. However this seems to be used even more rarely. I suspect that’s because of the manual nature of the procedure required to prepare the destinations. Courtesy of Planet PDF, here is that procedure:
First up, you’ll need to create the destination. To do this from within Acrobat:
- Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
- Go to View > Navigation Tabs > Destinations
- Under Options, choose Scan Document
- Once this is completed, select New Destination from the Options menu and enter an appropriate name
Now that you have created your destination, you can link to it using
a similar syntax to that used for page linking. After the name of the
PDF, append “#nameddest=” and the name of your chosen destination. So,
if your PDF has a named destination, “TOC”, that points to a table of
contents, then your link code will look like this:<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#nameddest=TOC">Link textLive and learn. Or in this case, relearn!
[Via Jon’s Radio]
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