Hyperlink

EasyCatalog can insert hyperlinks into your document, which will then appear when exported as an interactive PDF.

Hyperlink panel option

To insert a field as a hyperlink, change its type to be Hyperlink in the Field Options dialog.

The dialog is split into two sections: the top one determines what will appear in the document; the bottom one specifies the destination the user will be sent to when clicking on the hyperlink.

Custom field commands can be used in the Text and URL fields to retrieve content from other fields or dynamically build the URL.

Text

When inserting a text-based hyperlink, the contents of this edit field will appear in the document. You can either use static text, or include the content of other fields.

This setting is ignored when inserting a hyperlink on an image box.

URL

The URL for the hyperlink is specified in this box. You can include values from other fields by placing the field name within {brackets}. For example, if you include {SKU}, the content of the SKU field will be appended to the end of the hyperlink. Additionally, you can use Custom Field commands to construct the URL, allowing for dynamic and customized hyperlink generation based on your data fields.

Example

If you type Click here in the Text field and FIELDSTR('Product URL') in the URL field. When this field is inserted into the document, the text “Click Here” will appear which will be hyperlinked to the location specified in the “Product URL” field.

When inserting an image field, the “Text” field will be ignored.

Hyperlinking to another page

EasyCatalog can insert hyperlinks that link to other pages in the document or, if the document is stored in an InDesign Book, to pages in other documents in the book.

The most common usage of this is to produce contents or index pages that link to the actual page in the document when the user clicks on an entry.

The first step is to update your panel so that each record knows which page it is placed on. Use the Update panel with page numbers menu option.

A special URI scheme is used to instruct EasyCatalog to hyperlink to another page: the prefix ECPAGE:// is used.

ECPAGE://FIELDSTR('Product Page')

The page you’re hyperlinking to must either be:

1. in the same document as the field you’re inserting

2. in the same InDesign book as the document you’re inserting into. Therefore, the document must be added to the InDesign book prior to inserting the hyperlink.

Bookmarks

An InDesign bookmark can also be created when inserting a field by prefixing the contents of the URL field with BOOKMARK:

BOOKMARK:FIELDSTR('My BookMark Field')

In the above example, the contents of the text field will be inserted into the document, setting a bookmark using the contents of the ‘My Bookmark Field’.

NOTE: Bookmark hyperlinks are only supported when inserting text fields into the document, as InDesign does not support inserting a bookmark for images.