How To: Scribus - Part 7
This month we will discuss linking. You can have two types of links, one is where you link internally within your own document or externally where you link to something like a web page. I've made my page look nice and tidy for this one just to show you a few nice tricks.
Written by Ronnie Tucker
Here is how my page now looks:
What I'll do first is show you how to create a basic link to a web page. First we need to create a 'hot spot' around the piece of text that will become the link. As you move over the PDF icon in the menu bar you will see a down arrow appear beside it, click that down arrow to get two choices:
We want the 'Link' option which looks like two foot prints. So click that and then draw a box around the text (or image) you want to be the link.
Now I have a PDF 'Link' box around my text, incidentally you can put this box around anything as it will always be on top so you could surround an image and some text too if you wish. Double click inside that box to get its properties
This is the Annotation Properties window. At the moment it says the Type is 'Link', click that down arrow and make it 'External Web-Link' this now gives a place to type in a web address so type one in and click OK
Nothing seems to have changed but you will see later that it will create a link. But how will people know it's a link? I can tell you now that in the final PDF the reader won't know the link from ordinary text so won't know there is a link there, what I usually do is to make the text blue and underlined just to pretend it's a web link.
Double click on the text box, select the piece of text that is going to be the link, give it a color and make it underlined.
That looks more like a link you would expect to see.
Let's add a few pages to the document just to show how an internal link works. In the main menu click Page > Insert and choose to insert four new pages.
So my document now has a total of five pages. I'm just going to put some large numbers on each page so that we can distinguish them from one another.
So lets return to page one and put in a link that will make the reader jump to page 5.
Again, click the PDF button in the menu and choose 'Link', draw the box around some text and again double click the PDF box.
This time keep the Type as 'Link' and make the page number show as five. You'll see the page preview on the right change to show your page five. The X and Y position is to let you give an exact location on the landing page, I'm going to make both of them zero which will make the top of the page touch the top of the PDF viewer's display area making the page display fully.
So lets give that a quick test by exporting the document to a PDF file.
In the main menu click File > Export > Save As PDF
You'll see the Pre-Flight Verifier window, just click 'Ignore Errors' for now, we'll go into this in more detail soon.
That is your 'Save As PDF' now which has all the options you need to fine tune your PDF file but for now choose a save location at the top of the window then click Save.
This is my exported PDF file in KPDF (I use KDE) with the active external web link, and if I click the second link:
It jumps me to page five as expected.
We are almost finished with learning the basics of Scribus, next month we will delve in to the 'Pre-Flight Verifier' and the 'Save As PDF' tabs and options.
