Open Source Corner
Creating PDF Links in Scribus
by Stacey C. Falconer
hen you go to a web page that is listed as a PDF file, most of you probably wish you were on an HTML page. Why? PDF pages usually lack the colourful glitz and flashy bluster of HTML pages with all the rollover links, animations, and forms.
Surprise! PDF pages have been able to do most of that for a very long time. They can even incorporate linked video clips. All it takes is the full version of Adobe Acrobat or one of the few other commercial PDF editing programs out there with a price tag attached.
"The advantages in using PDF documents for web pages are several fold. First, the layout is rigidly static, and does not vary at all between operating systems. Secondly, text and images can be enlarged to almost any size while still maintaining the layout. PDF pages can also incorporate exotic fonts and text formatting that HTML pages just cannot handle. Also, printing from a PDF page is a lot easier..."
Scribus is a free and open source desktop publishing program that allows you not only to create pre-press quality documents it also allows you to embed web links to pages on the World Wide Web.
Scribus comes with a special set of tools for defining PDF push buttons, text fields, check boxes, combo boxes, and list boxes. In this article, we will only deal with the simplest way to create a link to an external document—a web page on the Big Blue and Cousins website. To do this, we only need to use Scribus' PDF Text Field tool.
First, it is still a good idea to put all the links on a different layer. This isolates them and makes them easier to work with, especially if they have to be nudged or resized a bit.
In this example, let us say that we have already place a thumbnail button to the August 2007 newsletter on a lower layer, and we want it to link us to the HTML page on the BB&C web site.
Click on the PDF Push Button tool, and draw a box around the thumbnail image. This creates a special field around the thumbnail that we can use to create the link. Normally, you would choose some rollover button images for this field, but we will leave the field empty. Right click on the newly created field, and go to the PDF Options > Field Properties menu item. The resulting dialogue box has several tabs, with some of them greyed out. We are only interested in the actions and the appearance tabs for simplicity, but if you want to incorporate rollover and click buttons to make it much more like a web page, you can do that in the second options tab.
Click on the Actions tab and in the Type pull-down menu, choose Java Script, and then Edit. In the dialogue that comes up, type in a very small amount of Java Script, and the URL of the web page that you want to go to. Whoa! You said 'Java Script?' No one said anything about Java Script! 'We don't need no steengking Jahva Screept!' ... Not to worry, you only need to learn it once. getURL("http://www.bbc.org/newsletter/aug07nl/aug07nl.php").
That's it! That was barely harder than typing it in to your browser's address bar. In fact, if you copy and paste the URL from your browser's address bar, that even makes it easier. If you want to link to a PDF file, and to a specific page, say page 10, then that only gets a slightly more complicated: getURL("http://www.bbc.org/newsletter/aug07nl/aug07.pdf#page=10"). [Note: This for Scribus generated pages. To make an HTML link that goes to a specific PDF page, e.g. page 10 of our August issue, use "http://www.bbc.org/newsletter/aug07nl/aug07.pdf#page=10" -ed]
Now it is time to decide if you want a line around the link, and you use appearance box to do that. It will normally have a line by default, but I choose not to, and turn the colour and line weight off. Check to make sure that Highlight is set to invert or outline, which causes a type of roll over by default.
The advantages in using PDF documents for web pages are several fold. First, the layout is rigidly static, and does not vary at all between operating systems. Secondly, text and images can be enlarged to almost any size while still maintaining the layout. PDF pages can also incorporate exotic fonts and text formatting that HTML pages just cannot handle. Also, printing from a PDF page is a lot easier since they are usually designed that way to start with. I feel a web page document should be designed with readability as one of the top priorities, and not for selling flashy advertising.
Some disadvantages of using PDF files include larger file size, it is much harder (though not impossible) to embed video clips, and it's a lot harder to put those annoying, flashing, and sometimes nauseating ads that seem to take up most of the room on web pages... Hey, that is not a disadvantage!
