You can have references to other pages that occur within an index table, or randomly within the text of the document, automatically linked to the page(s) they reference.
If the entries in an index table are not hyper-linked to their target pages, you can let PDF Nomad Pro attempt to quickly link each page reference through the Tools → Outline and Link Automation → Link Index Table Entries To Target Pages menu item.
Enter the numbers of the first and last pages of the Index Table.
Select a representative page in the preview area and then drag on the page to select the area that contains the table, excluding any headers or footers.
Click Detect Columns And Offset to have PDF Nomad automatically detect columns and the offset between even and odd pages. If the results are not correct you can re-select the overall area, adjust the Inter Column Gap setting and try again. The Inter Column Gap setting hints to PDF Nomad the minimum distance between two columns. Dragging the slider to the left decreases the minimum distance, dragging it to the right increases the minimum distance.
The Even Pages Offset field allows manual adjustment of the offset (the distance of the text from the left margin) between even and odd pages.
The Skip Regular Expression field allows entry of plain text or a regular expression, which will be ignored if it occurs at the end of an entry, this is necessary for entries like: “Circle Tool 24, 34-35. See also: Tools.” Where there is additional text after the page references. For such circumstances you would enter a regular expression like: “\. See also:.*”, which would find each occurrence of text starting with a period, followed by a space and the formulation “See also:” plus arbitrary text following it, and ignore it while analysing the line.
Link Indexes Only controls whether the whole entry is linked, or only the page indexes themselves.
Locate targets tells PDF Nomad to look for the first occurrence of the relevant text in the entry on the target page and to link directly to that section of the page. If you switch this option off PDF Nomad will always create the links to the page itself, rather than to a specific location on the page. Index table entries do not generally lend themselves very well for this option to achieve good results across the board, but, depending on the situation, it may still be helpful.
Use the Tools → Outline and Link Automation → Link Cross-Document References to Target Pages... menu item to link references to other pages to their target pages.
Enter the page range(s) you would like to be analysed and linked and enter a regular expression that describes the formulations that contain references to other pages in the document. The element(s) of the formulation that indicate the page reference need to be enclosed in a capture group (= enclosed in parentheses). Additional capture groups may be used for other elements, as needed to construct an adequate regular expression.
Expressions that contain exactly two capture groups may be defined with one of the capture groups indicating the location on the target page to link to. You can specify whether the first or the last capture group indicates the location. See the first example.
When Link Whole Match is selected, the complete match is linked, rather than only the page number.
Example regular expressions:
section\s+([a-zA-Z0-9\.]+)\s+on\s+page\s+([0-9]+)
…finds occurrences like: section 5.1.4 on page 27
In addition, if Location On Target Page is set to Location First or Location Last, it will link to the first occurrence of the text “5.1.4” on page 27.
on page ([0-9]+)
…finds occurrences like: on page 24
(see|on)\s+page[s]?\s+([0-9]+)\s*(,|and|through)?\s*([0-9]+)?\s*(,|and|through)?\s* ([0-9]+)?\s*(,|and|through)?\s*([0-9]+)?
…finds and links occurrences like:
• see page 12
• on page 15
• see pages 61, 119
• on pages 40 through 43 and 167 through 170
• on pages 108 and 123 through 124
• see pages 148, 150 and 157