hyperlinks and anchors

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In Publisher i have to reattach hyperlinks to anchors everytime I change the page. Is there a way to lock them? Thank you.

[walt.farrell]

Can you show us some screenshots or a recording to demonstrate the problem? Or tell us a bit more about the hyperlinks and anchors you're creating?

Or perhaps provide a sample .afpub document that shows it happening?

[dead]

It's a Publisher document in which I set an anchor; title one, copy that, bring it to contents and set that copy as a hyperlink, which works fine. However if I try to say move that section (anchored section) to another area in the document when I try to use the hyperlink in contents which worked before it won't and I'll have to reset it. It's not a big deal but just a little clumsy with the way I work with the document. If I make an hyperlink can I lock it onto the anchor I first choose? Thank you for your time!

[walt.farrell]

Sorry; I'm still not understanding. For example, I'm not sure what "bring it to contents" means. Are you manually building a TOC, rather than letting Publisher do it for you? (And if so, why?)

[MikeTO]

Are you saying you are making a hyperlink from a table of contents entry to a heading's anchor? If so, that's not a good idea, the TOC is replaced each time it is updated which is why you would need to keep recreating them.

You don't need to do create hyperlinks from a TOC to anchors, Publisher will do that for you automatically. Select the "Include as PDF bookmarks" option in the TOC panel and include bookmarks when exporting to PDF and Publisher will convert your TOC entries into hyperlinks. If you want to make them look like hyperlinks, you can do that by editing the TOC entry's text style. But never manually select text in the TOC and make it into a hyperlink.

[henryb]

is there a way to hyperlink a phone number in the PDF we're making in Affinity Publisher? (So that the phone number's hyperlink will maybe open up a FaceTime app or something on your Mac or PC (or just the phone app to make a regular call if you click on the link from a phone)? Obviously this hyperlink CANNOT be an https link...

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, henryb said:

is there a way to hyperlink a phone number in the PDF we're making in Affinity Publisher? (So that the phone number's hyperlink will maybe open up a FaceTime app or something on your Mac or PC (or just the phone app to make a regular call if you click on the link from a phone)? Obviously this hyperlink CANNOT be an https link...

I've just tried the suggestion in the following post, and it seems to work:

Basically, you hyperlink to a URL, but make the URL tel: put-number-here instead of https://something. As that's not documented as working, I can't say that it will always work in the future, nor whether it works with all PDF viewers.

[henryb]

11 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I've just tried the suggestion in the following post, and it seems to work:

Basically, you hyperlink to a URL, but make the URL tel: put-number-here instead of https://something. As that's not documented as working, I can't say that it will always work in the future, nor whether it works with all PDF viewers.

hey thanks for the reply! But just tried it (on my Mac) and it doesn't seem to work... So, I double clicked on my phone number in the Affinity Publisher PDF I'm working on, right clicked, Interactive, Insert Hyperlink, Hyperlink type: URL, In the URL field I typed "tel: +306944121212" and hit OK. But when I then right click on the phone number in the publisher document I'm working on, Interactive, Go To Hyperlink Target, nothing happens at all! (Whereas if I do the same in for my website, when I hit Go To Hyperlink Target it simply opens Safari and goes to that url...).

Am I doing something wrong? 

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, henryb said:

Am I doing something wrong?

I have no idea how/whether "go to hyperlink" should work within Publisher. Sorry.

As for viewing the PDF, you might try a different viewer. I used Adobe Acrobat Reader.

[MikeTO]

I couldn't get this to work with Publisher but did with Pages, so perhaps it's not a supported feature. I wouldn't expect it to work unless Phone were listed as an option.

It worked fine with a PDF I created with Apple Pages. With Publisher, the PDF worked fine in Apple Pages and hard crashed Acrobat Reader. I couldn't find a syntax that didn't crash Acrobat.

Note that with Apple Preview, you have to right-click (Ctrl click) the link and choose Open Link or it will just give you a system beep and not make the call. With Acrobat Reader it wil just make the call after alerting you that the document is trying to do that.

[lacerto]

For me a URL hyperlink using the format tel:+#######  works both in PDF viewers tested (Adobe Acrobat Reader on macOS Sonoma 14.1.2 and Adobe Acrobat Pro and One Drive reader app on Windows 11 Pro), and also when selecting a hyperlink in Publisher and choosing Go to Hyperlink Target from the context menu (but not if I click the Go to Target button in the Hyperlinks panel, which seems to "clean" the tel: prefix from the address and accordingly does not invoke the system caller app linked to telephone urls). EDIT: Just checked, and "Go to Target" button does work on macOS, but not on Windows.

[henryb]

22 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I have no idea how/whether "go to hyperlink" should work within Publisher. Sorry.

As for viewing the PDF, you might try a different viewer. I used Adobe Acrobat Reader.

what do you mean? I thought you said it worked for you. Do you mean that the reason I'm not getting my Mac to call my number via this hyperlink I just made is BECAUSE I'm trying to "go to" it from WITHIN Publisher (via the 'Go to hyperlink' button), but if I save the pdf and open it with another reader in my Mac it will work?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, henryb said:

but if I save the pdf and open it with another reader in my Mac it will work?

I did not try invoking via "go to" in Publisher, as I don't have anything on my machine that (as far as I know) would make a call. But it works from a PDF, which is where you want it to work.

But, from a PDF, it may depend on what PDF viewer you use.

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

But, from a PDF, it may depend on what PDF viewer you use.

It may be so, but e.g. in Adobe Acrobat Pro and Reader, the link works as it is, without Acrobat needing to generate a link, and where ever I have tried this, the link basically invokes something like this (this time in Firefox):

...both on Windows and macOS, so the link itself seems to be syntactically correct, and if an app is configured to make a call, this will happen. But it may of course be that some PDF viewers do not invoke an app call, or that making this to happen requires a supporting app preference, or user-confirmed system security agreement, or that the system ignores the call if there is no calling device configured. But e.g. Windows will suggest downloading Microsoft based Windows store apps that allow creating such configuration if it does not already exist. On macOS it may be that only Apple mobile devices are supported...

[walt.farrell]

31 minutes ago, lacerto said:

But it may of course be be that some PDF viewers do not invoke an app call, or that making this to happen requires a supporting app preference,

True. Some viewers have an option to examine the text and "invent" links for things that look like they should be linked.

[lacerto]

24 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

True. Some viewers have an option to examine the text and "invent" links for things that look like they should be linked.

Yes, e.g. Acrobat Reader. But in case of tel: link, the link works as it is, so the link physically exists and works as it is, so there is no assistance on behalf of the app itself when it invokes the app call, it basically just passes what is given, what it recognizes as a link, so what happens, depends on the system configuration. So in Adobe Acrobat Reader, app call is invoked based on existing link, whether app based link generation is disabled (like it is below):

But when clicked, Adobe Reader will require document-specific acceptance from the user before actually passing the call.

In the following link are formal specs by Nokia from year 0, and also examples, so the link above is formally correct:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2806

[dead]

On 1/7/2024 at 10:31 AM, MikeTO said:

Are you saying you are making a hyperlink from a table of contents entry to a heading's anchor? If so, that's not a good idea, the TOC is replaced each time it is updated which is why you would need to keep recreating them.

You don't need to do create hyperlinks from a TOC to anchors, Publisher will do that for you automatically. Select the "Include as PDF bookmarks" option in the TOC panel and include bookmarks when exporting to PDF and Publisher will convert your TOC entries into hyperlinks. If you want to make them look like hyperlinks, you can do that by editing the TOC entry's text style. But never manually select text in the TOC and make it into a hyperlink.

What I'm doing is compiling and still navigating as to what information should go where. As a temporary help I simply wanted to be able to click a link at the beginning of a document which would bring me to that anchor in the document. Thank you for your answer and link, I will be using it quite a bit! Have a great day!!

[MikeTO]

11 minutes ago, dead said:

What I'm doing is compiling and still navigating as to what information should go where. As a temporary help I simply wanted to be able to click a link at the beginning of a document which would bring me to that anchor in the document. Thank you for your answer and link, I will be using it quite a bit! Have a great day!!

Navigating a long document in Publisher can be difficult. Sections aren't visible in the Pages panel so you can't jump to the start of a section very easily. If you work on a small screen you don't have the space to make the thumbnails large enough to differentiate, and if your pages all look the same it won't help anyway.

The Trick I use when working on a long document is to use placeholders I can find with Find and Replace. I just type ** before a key word and Find will highlight all of those. I generally only have half a dozen areas that I'm working on at once so that gives me an instant list of targets to navigate to. Since the Find and Replace panel shows the text that follows the search string, searching for ** will then show the key words I inserted the ** in front of. This makes navigation while editing a snap.

Cheers

[dead]

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

The Trick I use when working on a long document is to use placeholders I can find with Find and Replace. I just type ** before a key word and Find will highlight all of those.

 

Great idea!! I think I'll incorporate it if you don't mind!!