Internal and external links

Pages that link out of themselves and to each other.

A link draws nothing, so nothing on a page proves it is there: only following it does. This document is built to be followed — the first page carries a contents list whose lines lead to the pages after it and an address that leaves the document altogether, and every later page leads back.

Bookmarks are here too, so the same structure appears down the side of the reader. The example also runs in an archival mode, because a link in a PDF/A file obeys rules of its own about what it may point at and how it must be described.

What this example shows

  • Links to another page of the same document, by destination.
  • Links that open an address outside the file.
  • Bookmarks putting the same structure down the side of the page.

The code, in full

The same document is written twice, once in each language. Both files are shown in full, with the code coloured on the server, and can be copied in one click.

The document itself

The same document is written in each of these languages. Open the one you want to look at.

Open the document in English Open the document in French

Read the Rust source Read the Python source

First page of Internal and external links

What this document weighs

Before 112,095 bytes
Now 41,491 bytes
Saved 63.0 %

Not one mark on the page changed. See every document measured.

Examples near this one

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.

PDF417 codes

A page of PDF417 codes, drawn as stacked bars.

Every example, by subject

Glossary

PDF/A
A PDF made to be readable in twenty years' time. Everything it needs is inside the file — the fonts, the colours, the description of what it is — so nothing it depends on can go missing later. Public bodies and archives ask for it by name.