* The Quest for the Fabled Format
Posted on March 20th, 2010 by Darcy. Filed under Publishing, Secret Projects.
Sir Nimble and Sir Ungainly are assaulting the hilltop fortress of Dread Lord Redblade. Their quest? To discover a digital document format that allows hyperlinking within itself. They’ve looked at HTML, and they don’t like having to use a web-browser interface. They like .pdf, but their sovereign can’t seem to make Acrobat Professional 7.0 do this.
They need your help. This is their most desperate hour. You are their only hope.
10 Responses to “The Quest for the Fabled Format”
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March 20th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Oh, for the sake of clarity, here are the simple criteria:
- It should be a multi-page digital format (like a pack of digital index cards).
- it needs to support graphics and text.
- it needs to hyperlink from one page to another.
- I don’t like tables of contents for this hyperlinking.
- I don’t want to use pure html, because it doesn’t allow me to guarantee the layout of the finished product.
March 20th, 2010 at 11:50 am
PDFs _can_ do intra-document linking. One way to do this is to use InDesign’s linking features. When exporting to PDFs, these get changed to links within the PDF. As an example, check out the PDF on this page and search for text that says “see pg.”. Click the page number and it takes you to that page.
Other format choices.
Apple’s new product (the iPad) will use the ePub format, which means it will probably get more popular soon.
March 20th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Hey Darcy,
You can do internal links in PDF. InDesign has tools for it, at least. I dunno if you have InDesign, but if you do let me know if you need a walkthrough of how to do it.
-ndp
March 20th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Does this have to be cross-platform? Or can it work with just windows (and linux)?
In any case, look at Microsoft help files will do the job, but you start with HTML. Which will let you format stuff for print, just not easily.
The other option is to use Acrobat Pro (not reader).
To create a link to another page:
1. Choose the Select Tool
2. select the text that you want to be a hyperlink,
3. right click the selected text,
4. choose “Create Link” in the context menu.
5. Fill out what you want the link to look like,
6. Select “Go to a page view” for the Link Action,
7. Browse to the page you want to go to as if you’re reading the PDF.
8. Click on “Set Link”.
When you click on the link, it should take you to the hyperlinked page without any problems. It will maintain the same zoom level and everything.
March 20th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Hi Wordman,
Cool! I’ll check out your sample document next week when I have access to non-dialup. I tried dl’ing it, and well, it looks like it’s kinda big.
One of the things that your link to wikipedia got me to wondering about is whether or not pdfs can track a parent-child relationship — essentially a “back” button within a document.
Finally, given the virutally unmatched universality of pdf, it’s the best contender (Hey, Barnes & Noble, your e-reader should support pdfs, you big dummies!)
March 20th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Hi Nathan,
Hook me the hell up! I’m running InDesign CS2 on Windows XP.
March 20th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Another option I forgot about is ePub. It is designed for publishing eBooks but does not retain page information. You can hyperlink to different sections just like in HTML.
The main strength of this format is that it is readable on everything but the Kindle 2 & DX including many software packages on different OSes.
Of course, HTML has the same ubiquity…
Adobe InDesign can create ePub files in addition to PDF.
March 20th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Hi Curt,
I’m reading up on ePub right now. How familiar are you with it? This project will be a gaming book – so it will be mostly paragraph text, some lists and quite a few images. The layout will be pretty important — images have to stay with the associated text and so on. Is ePub up to the task?
Also, cross-platform (at least Windows and Mac, although Linux would be a very welcome bonus) is a must.
March 21st, 2010 at 1:10 am
Yep, it’s 100% cross platform for all major OSes in addition, almost all of the ebook reading devices (amazon kindle 2 and dx are out) handle the format readily.
The epub format is basically xhtml (web pages) and look pretty good. You can even use JavaScript to view an epub book.
I suggest you visit Sigil — it is not only an epub editor, but the site also has a bunch of tutorials on how to fix tables, add links (aka hyperlinks), center images, do drop caps, etc. If it can be done with XHTML and CSS, you can do it in epub, for the most part.
The only real drawback is that the format does not guarantee that you keep the same print style/layout. While it will keep things in order, it does not retain the original pages. This is due to text reflow which is what makes it important for ebook readers. So if you have something that says “See page 13″ you might want to change it to a hyperlink “See the table on combat” or something similar.
March 24th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
PDF is the best answer here, simply because most people already have a PDF reader. I also recommend looking into Lyx, a WYSIWYM LaTeX editor that can do cross referencing among other things. It’s free and availible for both Linux and Windows and produces PDF-documents.