Creating a Link to a PDF

Documentation Freeway
1

In order to link to a PDF file the file must be placed on your web server. Once on there you can link to it like linking to any web page.

There are two ways to place the file on to the server - through Freeway using the one of the Actions (see below) or by using a third party FTP client such as Transmit or Cyberduck

To use Freeway you can use one of two methods:

USING THE GRAPHIC LINK TO PDF ACTION

A. Create a graphic item on your page, go to Item > Action and choose Graphic Link to PDF. In the Actions palette you can choose the file and how it will appear on the visitor's computer when the link is clicked. Choosing "In Place" will open the PDF in the same browser window.

USING AN A STANDALONE ACTION

B. Create an Action Item from the Insert > Action Item > Link to PDF menu option. This can either be placed inline with some text or it can be a standalone item.

In order to make it an inline text item do the following:

  1. Draw an HTML item on your page and write some text in it.
  2. Create an inline Action Item by going to Insert > Action Item > Link to PDF.
  3. An Action Item Labelled Acrobat will now appear in the line of text.
  4. Click outside of the HTML item and then select the Link to PDF item that you just created.
  5. Open the Action Palette in Window > Actions.
  6. In here you can do three things with the Link to PDF Action.
    1. Select the PDF file to link to.
    2. Set how the PDF is to open - In Place (in the current Frame or Window), in Full Window (in the current Window) or in a New Window.
    3. The name - or in other words, the text that will be displayed where the Action is. For example - if this is left as "download" (the default setting) then when you preview or view the page online you will see the word "download" in the position of the Action Item.
  7. Once you publish or preview the site the PDF file you selected in point 1 will be placed in your Resources folder ready for upload.

Note: You may need to upload the site to test this - in some cases the link will point to your Resources folder when viewed locally (on your machine). This will not happen when viewed remotely (online).

The second way to link to a PDF is to place the PDF onto your web server manually using an FTP client application.

  1. Using an FTP client logon to your web server using the details provided by your ISP/Host. You should see your HTML files - index.html etc and your Resources folder.
  2. Place your PDFs into the Resources folder making note of there filenames. This copies the files over so you will still have them on your machine.
  3. Now open up Freeway and find the text that you want to link to one of the PDFs, if you haven't got any yet then create some (it must be HTML text or alternatively it can be a graphic item - but not the text within a graphic item).
  4. With this HTML text or graphic item selected open the Hyperlink dialog using either Edit > Hyperlink or command-K
  5. Select the External tab and in the large space provided type the following:
    Resources/filename.pdf
    or:
    http://www.yourdomain.com/Resources/filename.pdf
    Replacing yourdomain for your domain name and filename for the name of the PDF.