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Bill Swallow said "[Adobe's] documentation does a fine job at explaining
how to create links." Sorry, Bill, but I still disagree with you on that.
I'm going to be a bigger PITA about it too. :)
In my opinion, it falls apart at step 6. First off, it's vague about what
action to choose. I know they mean to make it universal so it applies to
various kinds of links, but it's fairly probable the user is looking for
"Go to View." (Other types of links include "Execute menu item" and
"Movie." Not what I think of as links.)
Then, it refers you to "Using actions for special effects" to get the
information that you need right there, at that moment, on that page. If I'm
in the middle of trying unsuccessfully to create a link, I don't want to go
on a wild goose chase for the information I need... and I especially don't
want to go read about special effects. When I think "special effects," I
think about animated graphics, blinking text, or background sound -- not
hyperlinks.
If you *do* go to "Using actions for special effects," you are subjected to
a discourse on what Adobe allows you to do, blah blah blah:
"Acrobat allows you to add special effects to PDF documents.You can specify
that a particular action will occur when a bookmark, link, or form field is
selected, or when a page or form is viewed..." Uh-huh. "For example, you
can use links and bookmarks to jump to different locations in a document,
----"
Yes! How?
"but you can also use them to play movies and sound clips, execute commands
from a menu, or other actions. Page actions are another way of activating
special effects in a PDF document. For example, you can specify a movie or
sound clip to play when a page is opened or closed."
Arggh!!
[the document then lists all action types and their use]
...in a veritable flood of information, when all I want to know is how to
make a hyperlink. Buried in this stream of stuff describing what each
action type does is this little gem, on page 409:
"Go to the destination where you want the reader to end up,and set the
position and magnification for the view. You can either navigate to the
location in the current document or choose File > Open, select a PDF file,
then go to the destination."
Considering how likely it is that users will want to create a hyperlink,
this "how to" information should be highlighted and put where users will
find it--not in the middle of a long reference section that they are likely
to skip when they're in the middle of something and they just want to see 7
+/- 2 numbered steps.
Incidentally, none of the 15 index entries under "Links" pointed to page
409.
If Adobe's note in step 6 had said something like this...
"Note: To link to another page of this PDF document, select Go To View.
With the Create Link dialog box open, navigate to the destination and click
Set Link. To link to a separate PDF file, open the file and then navigate
to the location where you want it to open; then select Set Link."
...then I wouldn't be kvetching.
Interestingly, the dialog box itself does tell you what to do, sort of, if
you happen to notice: "use the toolbar, menus, and/or mouse to go to the
file, page, and view to be displayed." But I never even noticed that line
before now, because for every OTHER action type, the line under the
drop-down box DESCRIBES the often-self-explanatory action type. The fact
that Adobe deviated from this pattern to throw in an instruction is a clue
that they knew the procedure wasn't intuitive. So why didn't they make the
procedure unmistakably, effortlessly clear in their documentation, instead
of hiding the information in a "for more information" reference section?
I've never been fond of Acrobat's documentation. I've only found it helpful
when I've had the time to sit back for a while, read, and ponder at
leisure. If I'm in the middle of something and I'm under time pressure,
it's frustrating.
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