Links, navigation and how a file opens

Contents that jump, words that open an address, and page numbers that match the ones printed on the page.

A long document is only useful if a reader can move about in it. A line in a contents page can be made to jump to its chapter, a word can be made to open a web address, and a page can be given the number that is printed on it rather than the one it happens to be.

A document can also say how it wishes to be opened: at a particular page, at a particular magnification, with the contents panel already showing, or as a slideshow that moves on by itself for a screen in a waiting room.

What it saves you

The reader finds what they came for
A contents page that jumps turns a two-hundred-page handbook into something somebody will actually use, instead of a file they scroll through once and abandon.
Page three is the page marked three
A foreword numbered i, ii, iii and an annex numbered A-1 show those numbers in the reader's own page box, so a page quoted over the telephone is the page that gets opened.
It opens the way you meant it to
The document says where to start and how much to show, so the first thing a reader sees is the thing you wanted them to see.

See it done

Every one of these is a real PDF this library wrote, with the source that wrote it.

A slideshow that runs itself

Thirteen slides, each stating the effect it arrives by — all twelve the standard defines — how long that effect takes and how long the slide stands before the next one comes. The file opens full screen, which is the only place a reader reads any of it.

A handbook that says how it wants to be read

Four pages that state what happens the moment the file is opened: which page it opens on and how much of the window that page fills, the bookmarks shown beside it, the pages two at a time, a print dialogue already filled in, and the address its relative links are read against.

Links and marks on placed text

Links and marks hung on text the engine has already placed: a band behind a line, an underline, a boxed cell — every rectangle taken from what the layout and the table report afterwards, none of it measured by hand.