Hyperlinked PDFs made with OmniGraffle at bioneural.net

Isobel asks about creating intra-document hyperlinks in a PDF exported from OmniGraffle Pro. Here's how I would do it.

Links to online documents

Write your text containing the hyperlink. I include the hyperlink within the main text, but use the Font palette to underline and colour it to make it stand out:
I then create a new borderless object to sit over the text that I want to turn into a hyperlink. The advantage of doing it this way it that you can create a clickable area that is significantly bigger than would be created if you put the text inside its own object; this makes it easier for the reader to active the hyperlink:
With the clickable object selected, go to the Actions palette and set the Browse Tool to open a URL:
When you're done editing, save the document to PDF:
Opening the PDF in Preview, the Browse Tool should reveal a clickable hyperlink:

Links to other pages in the same document

This time in the Actions pane, instead of Opens a URL, choose Jumps Elsewhere. Now you have to choose both the type of jump, and the target canvas. To create a link to a particular page (canvas in Omnigraffle-speak) we want to choose Switch to a Specific Canvas:
Select the target canvas/ page:
This will cause the hyperlink to jump to another page, but not focus on any part of it. If you wanted to be more specific (such as jumping to a particular heading on another page), choose Center on a Point and use the cross-hair to identify the exact target:

Incidentally, I use Switch to Previous/ Next Canvas to create "Back" and "Forward" buttons to aid online reading of exported PDFs.

Last modified January 30th, 2008.

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5 responses to Hyperlinked PDFs made with OmniGraffle

1 Isobel
Jun 25th, 2007 at 9:59 am

Thank you, this is really great.
2 Bruce
Jun 25th, 2007 at 10:09 am

[quote comment="75622"]

Thank you, this is really great.

You're very welcome. Glad it was useful.
3 Mark
Jun 13th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

Hi Bruce, I've been scouring the internet for how to make tooltips appear in omnigraffle that will be preserved when exported to pdf. I'm writing a tech tree and I have a map of connections, I am trying to figure out how to make a new shape to appear and be populated with data of that technology onmouseover or onpress. (Guessing through some automator script but I can't figure out how to do it.) Any ideas? Thanks for you help, I really appreciate it.
4 Bruce
Jun 13th, 2008 at 6:09 pm

Mark, that's something I've requested too—I published a mock-up here in relation to HTML export. After I wrote to Omni in 2005 I'm pretty sure I received a response saying it had already been requested and was being considered. After the release of OmniGraffle 5 I contacted them again in Jan 2008 to point out it's ongoing omission, but received only an automated response.

I know of no hacks to make title elements/ tooltips appear in OmniGraffle exports, sorry. Acrobat can do it of course.
5 Mark N
Oct 5th, 2009 at 9:23 pm

Hi there

This is a great article, and something I've implemented many times for clients. I do have a question though and I'm hoping someone can help me out...

Has anyone created clickable PDFs using layers rather than pages? Every time I set up an action to 'show' a page layer, it simply doesn't work in PDF?

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers
Mark

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