Linking to Pages or Destinations Within PDFs

Dan Shea Planet PDF Associate Editor

April 29, 2004

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After looking through PDF forums all over the place, I've noticed that this particular question crops up all the time: "How can I link through to pages/named destinations WITHIN a PDF from my web page?" Being a true adherent to the "Economy of effort" principle (AKA just plain lazy), I thought it would be best to write this up as a tip to save typing it in each time.

Linking To Specific Pages

This is significantly simpler than linking to named destinations because it doesn't require any special steps to be taken in the preparation of the PDF file. I personally favor the page-linking method for this reason. In order to link through to a specific PDF page, begin with the domain, as you would for any web link:

http://www.mydomain.com/

Then add the name of the PDF document:

http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf

Then append "#page=" followed by the desired page number. For example, if you were looking to link to page 7:

http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#page=7

So in all, the HTML link code would be:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#page=7">Link text</a>

Linking to Named Destinations

First up, you'll need to create the destination. To do this from within Acrobat:

1. Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
2. Go to View > Navigation Tabs > Destinations
3. Under Options, choose Scan Document
4. Once this is completed, select New Destination from the Options menu and enter an appropriate name

Now that you have created your destination, you can link to it using a similar syntax to that used for page linking. After the name of the PDF, append "#nameddest=" and the name of your chosen destination. So, if your PDF has a named destination, "TOC", that points to a table of contents, then your link code will look like this:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#nameddest=TOC">Link text</a>

Happy linking!!