[Conway]

Hi All

I am planning to set up a document in Indesign or Illustrator for a client which is a High Street Recruitment agency, basically they want me to put togther a nicely presented table of candidates currently looking for work, along with various headings to identify each candidate in detail, one of which is key skills and background history about each candidate.

The last column they want at the end of this table is the heading View CV

The client has asked me if it is possible to set up this up as a pdf document which they would then forward onto a number of their clients who are looking to fill vancancies with candidates that are currently available and looking for work.

My question is, Is it possible to set up this View CV link within Indesign or Illustrator which, when clicked, would link straight to the cadidates word CV, Can such a feature be implented within a PDF file, and if so, How is this achieved?

I look forward to your replys...

[NeedForBleed]

Hi Conway, in short, it is possible. Now there are literally hundreds of ways of doing this, and many will suggest more efficient ways, (perhaps even importing the documents). But I'll show you one way which should be relatively straight forward, using InDesign.

Anyway, create the candidates name using the text tool (obviously), then highlight the text box. Before you do this, go to the tabs at the top of the screen, then go to window/interactive/hyperlinks.

Right, (with your textbox highlighted), you'll need to create a new hyperlink. There are a few ways to do this too, but I'll use the safe way as I've no idea which operating system you're using, but you're looking for an icon which looks like a little chain with a sun attached (this is found in the hyperlink popup window mentioned in the previous paragraph).

You should now be presented with a dialog box which has various options, the first being 'linked to'. Select 'file' here, then add the path of your word document below. Please note that your word documents destination can't be changed, otherwise you'll be linking to a missing directory.
I kept the shared hyperlink box ticked, and the appearance can be altered so that you don't have an annoying rectangle etc. Once you've got the file location sorted, click ok.

When you're done with all the links, goto the file tab at the top, then export as pdf. When you do this, make sure hyperlinks are enabled at the bottom. Then you should be done.

Open the pdf and see if it's linking!

[Conway]

Hi Need for Bleed

Thank you for your very clear and concise input on this matter, however I have a feeling that what your saying is not quite what I'm looking for, yes I need the pdf to link to the external word CV files which of course will link to these files when viewed on my own local computer, but how do I get such a feature to work when other users want to click and view these CVs within the pdf from thier OWN computers? They won't have these CV word docs on there local machines so will I need to host them on some server for the links to work?

[NeedForBleed]

Ahh yes, it's so much easier if you have the files hosted online. Otherwise it'd mean you'd have to have each of the word files sent with the PDF whenever it's used, and that is going to get messy somewhere down the line.
Basically, instead of linking to a file, you link to a URL. So to do this, all you need to do, in the 'link to' bit I mentioned, change it to 'URL' instead of 'file'. Then punch in the full address in the destination, which is directly below.

If you don't have your word files hosted online, then you may wish to import the documents into InDesign and the bit labelled 'link to' would be changed to 'pages' instead. Like I said before, there are many ways to do it, it's just a case of limitations and requirements.

All the best.