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I'm looking for a software which works on Windows that I can use to hyperlink selected text in a PDF to a page within the same PDF.

For example, let's say I have a PDF file called somepdf.pdf, and in that file I have a sentence that says 'Go to page 6'. I want to be able to add a hyperlink to that sentence such that someone who's reading it can click on it and go to page 6 of the PDF so it acts kind of like a page anchor.

Using bookmarks is out of the question because after adding these hyperlinks, I hope to convert the PDF to an HTML page that will (hopefully!) maintain those links. I've tried doing this with bookmarks but it didn't work.

I'd prefer it if the software were free and lightweight but if it has a trial version that doesn't leave watermarks or any kind of marking, I guess that would work too.

Any recommendations? Thanks in advance!

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  • You're rather not asking for PDF reading software, but for something creating PDFs in such a way. So it would help to know what you're using for that. I've just had to create a bunch of PDFs the way you want them, and found my text processor (LibreOffice) does a great job with that. So maybe some software you're using anyway already offers what you need? Installing LibreOffice just for that wouldn't match your requirement of being lightweight, so I cannot make that an answer :)
    – Izzy ♦
    Aug 19, 2015 at 15:23
  • Thanks for your reply! Yeah, I'm not looking for a PDF reading software. The files I've gotta work on are already PDFs and need to add links in them so that when I convert them to HTML using the "Free PDF to HTML Converter" (free-pdf-to-word.org/tutorials/… P.S. I'm not affiliated to them in any way) software, I'd still have the hyperlinks to places within the same PDF. Therefore, the PDFs aren't documents that I typed out and later converted to PDF.
    – admiralchip
    Aug 19, 2015 at 15:43
  • OK, then I'm out. Editing already existing PDFs is not that easy. You cannot even convert all of them to editable text (think of a scanned document with no OCR applied: that would be just images, so how to "add links to text" there). Sorry. Wish you good luck!
    – Izzy ♦
    Aug 19, 2015 at 15:46
  • It's alright. I appreciate the help. Thanks a bunch! Currently using Notepad ++ to edit the HTML files and put in the hyperlinks. Still hoping for a faster way though lol! :D
    – admiralchip
    Aug 19, 2015 at 15:48

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I would suggest that it would be much simpler to convert the pdf to html or markdown first, add any required links as relative hyperlinks and then if you also need the pdf + links convert the html/markdown to pdf format.

Note that you will need to add a named marker to the destination as well as using that name in the link as "Page 6" is only meaningful if the html is split into separate files, one for each of the pages, or there is a tag/name saying "Page 6" means here. Even within a pdf it is shaky to refer to "Page 6" as if re-pagination is allowed then, if the author was using A4 page size, but the viewer has specified A5 page size then "Page 6" will probably be somewhere between pages 8 and 15 depending on the content of pages 1-5, this is why the table of contents is a dynamic item.

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  • Converting it to html and adding the hyperlinks in the html was the way I was doing it before but it got kind of cumbersome and I have many files to edit. I thought that having a software that I could use to add the links to the pdf first before converting to html would make my job faster.
    – admiralchip
    Aug 19, 2015 at 5:50
  • It would still be manual - in pdf or markdown you could automate it in something like python by searching for "See" but the issue of references to pages still stands. In the pdf you may well find that the reference is to a named marker with a display style that shows it as "Page N" where N is computed based on the pagination. Pdf is a good output format but a poor input/editing format.
    – Steve Barnes
    Aug 19, 2015 at 5:55

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