Master Document Hyperlinks when exporting to PDF

[jondrake]

Hello

The following is a description of what I urgently want (need) to achieve.

Firstly, I am using OO Writer v3.0 on Windows Vista (in case this is relevant).

I have drafted a master document (.odm) containing a number of sub-documents - some sub-documents (.odt) have hyperlinks to other sub-documents - the basic idea being, "chapter blah (with a link to that chapter) has more information on this topic"

The entire master document needs to be exported to PDF for distribution to readers. What I was hoping to do was to have the hyperlinks in the doucment translate properly in the PDF so that they point to the correct places in the PDF once it has been exported. Basically, a link from one sub-document to another sub-document should become a link between two points in the PDF when the entire book is exported to PDF.

The end result should be that a person could click on a hyperlink in the PDF and be taken to the target spot in the same PDF (the master document, as-exported) that the link was pointing to. A decent illustration of how it should work are the hyperlinks in the contents section of the master document, which translate properly and point to the correct chapters in the PDF once exported. I was hoping to get all links (inserted into the .odt sub-documents) to work this way as well.

Can anyone help me?

[foxcole]

Try this:
http://oooauthors.org/en/authors/usergu ... uments.pdf

[pbalyx]

jondrake, I am facing exactly the same problem. I would build a large document using a master document but when I export it to pdf, the hyperlinks still point to the .odt documents.
I followed the link given by foxcole but this did not help me : "We’re sorry, but that page doesn’t exist…"
Have you found any solution ?

[TheRealOrion]

How big is your document? If it's small enough that you don't have to use a Master Doc, I'd recommend that you just cut/paste the whole thing into one file. That way, you can insert "Fields" into your doc and aim them all at a heading line somewhere else in the document, and then just define your chapters/sections/subsections as headings. If you do it right, they'll come out as cascading bookmarks in the PDF as well. This is exactly what I've done for two book-length projects, one 200+ page and one 300+ pages. The single document is a little hard to work with because something that big slows the system down a bit, but it solved so many of my linking/PDF problems that it's fully worth it. Frankly, at this stage, I'm just not all that keen on using Master Docs at all. They're too finicky. I'll wait for version 4.0 to try them again, I think.

[pbalyx]

Thanks for your answer. I intended to use Master Doc to dispatch subdocuments among several authors but this seem to be too much complicated. I will manage contributions by copy/paste.

[acknak]

Cross references between sub documents work for me when I export to PDF, if I follow the steps give here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... bdocuments.

It does take some fiddling, you can't just drag & drop, but it does work.

Whether it's a better strategy than cut & paste for collaborative documents, I can't say.