Add hyperlinks - Adobe Acrobat Tutorial

- One of Acrobat's most useful features is that it allows you to add links to PDFs. Links give the PDF user the ability to quickly move to sections of a document, which can be especially useful when navigating lengthy documents, Links can also be used to connect multiple PDFs together, or to send the user directly to a website. Now, in many cases both Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader, and many third-party viewing applications for that matter, have the ability to detect website addresses in the text and they make them clickable by default. But you never have a guarantee that whatever software the viewer is using will do that. So if you want to make sure some texts in your PDF is a working link, you should take some time to make it a link yourself. Now, in this document, we have a couple of instances of texts that should be clickable. Like on page three, we have this email address here, on page five we have this web address. That we see right here. Now over in the tools on the right, I'm going to click edit PDF, and the tools that appear at the top of the window, we have this link menu, and one of these options is Auto-Create Web links from URLs. So I'll select that. (mouse clicking) Now we get this message thing that this can't be undone. So you won't be able to choose edit undo after you do this. However, you could always just close the document without saving if you really needed to. But in this case, I do want to have it auto create links, so I'll click yes. I can choose which pages I want it to scan through. I'll leave all selected and click okay. (mouse clicking) And now I can see that it's created a total of four links. (mouse clicking) Now what we're not going to see is the standard blue underline texts that we associate with links on many webpages. We can't really see the links by default. To find them we need to come back up to the link menu. and choose, Add/Edit Web or Document Link. This is how you manually add links to your document, but it also highlights any existing links. So if I scroll through the document, I can see the links that it found. (mouse clicking) Here's one on page two. (mouse clicking) It's found the email address on page three. We don't have any on page four, actually miss this one here on page five. And I found a link down here on page six. There's one more email address here on seven, and I believe that's it. So it did a pretty good job of finding the links except for the one here at missed on page five. So it doesn't always catch all the addresses. So we're going to add it manually. Now to make sure I don't make a mistake by typing in this address by hand, I'm going to select the Edit tool and highlight this address. (mouse clicking) And I'll right click and copy it. Now, come back to the link menu and choose the Add/Edit option, that turns my cursor with this crosshair. And maybe I'll just zoom in a bit here so we can see this better. And I'm going to draw a box around this address. (mouse clicking) Ideally, you want it to be around all of the texts, basically covering the area that someone might click on to get to this link. And now I can see the properties of the link. I don't want it to be a visible rectangle. So I'm going to switch this to invisible. (mouse clicking) The highlight style is the appearance of the link when someone clicks on it. None means there will be no visual change. Invert reverses the color of the link area. Outlined draws a thin line around the link area. And Inset creates the effect of the link area being pushed into the page like a button. So I'll go with inset in case. Next, we have to specify what this link will do. Go to a page view, lets you jump to a location in this document or within another PDF. Open a file, lets you link to a file like an image or some other failure sharing. We also have open a webpage, which is what we went in this case. So I'll select that, and I'll click next. (mouse clicking) And here I'll right click and paste in that address that we copied. There it is I'll click okay. And let's test it by selecting the hand tool and notice when I roll my mouse over it, my icon turns into this pointing finger with a W for web inset and we see the address. Now this is a fictitious web address, but I can click it and you can see that it does in fact open up my web browser after I allow it to, but it won't actually go anywhere. (mouse clicking) Now let's take a look at the links that were automatically created. I'll go back and choose, Add/Edit Web or Document Links again so I can actually see them. And let's jump up to page two. And here's the link of created. I can double click on this one to see its properties. We can see that it's set as an invisible rectangle with the invert highlight style. And under the actions tab, we can see that it's set up properly to open this web address. Notice by the way that the link we pasted started with just www while this address starts with HTTP://. So both work, I'll just cancel that. On the next page we have this email link. (mouse clicking) So for email links, they have to start with mailto: followed by the address. So just keep that in mind, if you're ever creating an email link manually. (mouse clicking) Now on page six, we have this link that covers two lines. So Acrobat actually had to draw two rectangles. Let's double click check this. (mouse clicking) And we can see here that it did in fact, add the full URL here, red30-tech and I'll double click the second one here. (mouse clicking) And I got the full address in here as well. So Acrobat actually created two boxes here to make sure the entire text area was clickable. All right, So that's how to add links to your PDFs both automatically and manually.