Hyperlinks in books

[Gianni Becattini]

Is there any way to add an hyperlink from a book chapter to another chapter?

Thanks

[walt.farrell]

Interesting question, Gianni.

I do not see any way to hyperlink from one chapter file into another one within a Book.

[MiriamNZ]

If you cannot hyperlink between your chapters then the Book feature is not usable for pdfs that include internal hyperlinks.

I have had no problem creating links into other chapters (links to pages), and the table of contents has links that go to the pages in any of the chapters.

But I could not test it, as I am unable to export the whole book into a single document.
When I export individual chapters it removes links to the other chapters as they are not part of that particular, singular pdf.

Every time I try to export a book as a combined pdf Publisher 2 crashes soon after it starts the export.

(Yesterday I spent hours combining all my chapters; fixing all the duplicated styles that resulted (which took about 3 hours), so that I could have working hyperlinks in my final book pdf.)

[Gianni Becattini]

Thanks, friends.

@Miriam: I also spent a lot of time on the terrible book export. I can give you some results:

• with long URL hyperlinks (string length greater than...) the export process crashes in the middle (and obtain a corrupted pdf) or process remains stuck;
• that is not valid in general, but is triggered by some specific images. Removing them, all returns OK. In my case, the images were APhoto large and complex files. Probably the conversion process has some bug when it converts these document in images to create the pdf.

In my case, reducing the complexity of the files (or shortening the hyperlinks) resolved.

Would you please explain me how you "created links into other chapters (links to pages)". Something like "see at page 21" ?

Thanks

[Dan C]

Hi all,

Thanks for your post and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.

I can confirm that we've made multiple changes to the way that Books and Chapters are handled in the latest beta version, v2.1, and I would recommend trying this as outlined here with a copy of your files - 

Should you have any further issues with books or hyperlinks in v2.1, you can post here for our team to investigate further:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/139-new-bugs-and-issues-in-the-betas/

I hope this helps

[swinxx]

so is this working not. we are working with affinity publisher version 2.3.1 and i can not find the possibility to hyperlink from one chapter of a book to another. is this possible now? if yes, please tell me how??

best wishes.

[walt.farrell]

12 minutes ago, swinxx said:

we are working with affinity publisher version 2.3.1 and i can not find the possibility to hyperlink from one chapter of a book to another. is this possible now? if yes, please tell me how??

If you create an Anchor in one chapter (Book file) you can Hyperlink to it from a different chapter (Book file).

However, in a test just now I found that it might be necessary to Save an open chapter file and reopen it before the other chapters will recognize new anchors in that chapter.

[swinxx]

The tip „using books“ and „anchors“ was golden! Now it works! Thank you so much! Interestingly you are probably the only active publisher user, who knows this! 😂

Edited January 29, 2024 by swinxx

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, swinxx said:

Interestingly you are probably the only active publisher user, who knows this!

I expect that @MikeTO would also know it, as he has invested significant time exploring Publisher in order to create his excellent manual. I am just a dabbler so far  

 

 

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I am just a dabbler so far  

Haha, just a dabbler! 🙂

I got different results on macOS:

Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2024-01-29-093053.ips

1. Create a new document, I created text (art text or frame doesn't matter) with "chapter 1" in it. Save as 1.afpub
2. Create another new document, I created a text object with "chapter 2" in it. Save as 2.afpub
3. Create a book, add both chapters to it
4. In chapter 1, add an anchor to the text object
5. In chapter 2, add a hyperlink. Set type to anchor, choose chapter 1. On choosing chapter 1 it will immediately crash.

FWIW I repeated this several times in 2.3.1 and the 2.4 beta but one time I was interrupted after adding the anchor to chapter 1 and just before I added the hyperlink to chapter 2, and when I returned it worked fine. Maybe there's a timing issue with the modified file.

I also tested cross-references which has a similar chapter selector and that didn't crash.