Whether you are a teacher who develops course notes and homework and makes them available to students online, a decision maker at a government agency that wants to make documents and reports accessible to the general public via the Internet, or an individual who writes lengthy documents such as textbooks, course modules, user guides , technical reports , proposals or feasibility studies and wants to share files with others without having to worry about compatiblity issues, the hyperlink and PDF tools can be very useful to you. These tools address two of your more important concerns: convenience and portability. This article describes how you can create hotlinked PDF files using OpenOffice.org Writer.
Creating hotlinks using the Hyperlink tool
To create a hotlinked table of contents:
1.Apply styles to headings in the document.
2.Move the insertion point to the top of the document.
3.Choose Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables.
4.Click the Entries tab of the window, click to the left of the E and click Hyperlink. The letters, LS will appear before the box you clicked.
5.Click after the E and click Hyperlink again. The letters , LE appear in the box after the one you clicked.
6.Click All to put hyperlinks on all levels of the TOC. Click OK.
A hotlinked table of contents appears on the location of the insertion point.
Adding a “Back to top” link in the Footer
To make it easy for you to go back to the table of contents from any other section within the document, you can create a link in the footer .
1.Add a footer in your document. (Insert – Footer-Default)
2.Click in the footer and add text that says “back to top.”
3.Select the text that says “back to top” on the footer .
4.Click the Hyperlink icon on the Standard toolbar.
5.Click the Document icon on the left side.
6.Click the Target in Document icon. It’s the round one to the right of the “Target in document” box. The Navigator window opens.
7.Link to any heading, table, object, etc. in your document, or in any other document. Click Apply, and Close.
8.In the hyperlink window, click Apply and Close again.
Hotlinking to anywhere else in the document
You can add links to each chapter in the document in the footer .
1.Follow instructions 1 to 6 in the previous section, substituting “back to top” with the chapter number.
2.In the Navigator, choose Headings.
3.Then select the Chapter Heading from the list that appears.
4.Click Apply and Close in the Navigator and Hyperlink box.
Hotlinking to a website
1.Select the text to link.
2.Click the Hyperlink icon.
3.Select Internet on the left.
4.On the Target box, type the URL.
5. Click Apply. Click Close.
Converting files to PDF using the PDF tool
Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is the ideal format to use when distributing documents via the web because it is platform and software independent. As long as the free Acrobat Reader is installed on your computer, you can read files created from any application, on any computer system and share it with anyone around the world. Schools, government agencies , organizations and businesses everywhere use the format to distribute documents over the Internet.
To create a PDF version of your file:
1.Simply click on the PPDF icon on the Standard toolbar.
2.OOo creates a PDF file in the same folder/directory as your .odt file.
3.Find the .pdf file from the directory then double click it.
4.Voila! A hotlinked PDF file courtesy of OpenOffice.org.
