How to organize and inter-link a tagless technical PDF textbook?

Acrobat has a link tool and depending upon your authoring program, you might be able to create internal links that convert to hyper text links during the conversion process.

I didn't make the book though, and don't have access to the source text, just the scrambled/exported pdf I have now.

There are linking tools out there, among them ARTS Aeralist, which has a reputation to simplify linking.

If that does not work out, you may end up with doing quite a bit by hand. Probably the easiest would be adding "named destinations" to the target places, and then make internal links where you jump to that destination. This brings advantages when you have to jump to a certain place from various starting points.

Hope this can help.

Max Wyss.

You could also discuss this with the creator or distributor of the PDF.

Aerliast and similar add ons don't do this. I can get as far as creating a named destination automatically for each and every section I want to link to, but can only manually link the numerous references to it by selecting from a huge drop down list of named destinations for each and every link.

Same thing for AutoBookmark, NitroPDF, etc.

OK, now, we may have to become a bit more creative. I have an idea, however, it may or may not work, and it is a little bit messy. And it depends a lot on the document and the way the already created named destinations are created and named.

Assuming that the references are kind of consistent, we may use the Redaction tool to find all the occurrences of the source points. As the Redact markers are annotations, we can convert them into links (which are also annotations). If we have a kind of logical connection between the text found and the named destination, we could even semi-automate this.

It is possible to do something like that (I have a project where we are doing something similar, and the client is very happy (tm) with it. Describing the solution would, however get beyond the scope of this forum. So, if you consider "buy" as an alternative to "make", it may be a good idea to talk in private; feel free to contact me at max at prodok dot com.

Max Wyss.

thanks for your help I'll try it
I wouldn't be interested in purchasing a solution as I'm just a student trying to make the e-book easier to learn just for myself, not worth a lot of money to me
but I'm sure it is to a ton of publishers if they knew about it

OK, I got it to automatically select all instances of say "Section 1.1.1"
It draws a red box on all "Secton 1.1.1" on all pages through the book

But I don't know how to convert these all to link to the real section 1.1.1,
How to convert the redactions to links?

One possibility is to enumerate all the annotations. For each Redaction annotation, you create a new Link annotation with the according action, and then you destroy the Redaction annotation.

It does involve quite a bit of JavaScript, and you may spend a bit of time working through the Acrobat JavaScript documentation.

Max Wyss.