Creating Text Links In Mac Pages

You can set up bookmarks in a Pages word processing document and then create links in other text to jump to those bookmarks in PDF readers. With a new feature in Pages 8.1, you can also create links in page layout documents to jump from text to a specific page in the document.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create links inside a Pages document including the new ability to do that in Page Layout mode.
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So you can create links from one piece of text to another piece of text inside of a word processing document in Pages. But there is a new feature that will allow you to do the same thing if you're in Page Layout mode. Let me show you how to setup each kind of link.
Here's a typical word processing document. There's lots of text here and I've got it divided into chapters. I have some page breaks and a Table of Contents that I have inserted that will create page links all on its own to each chapter. But what if I wanted to add some other links. Like, for instance, after the Table of Contents maybe I want to include a list of links to poems in the text here in this book. So I could do that in two steps. The first step is I need to create a Bookmark inside the document. The second step is I could add a link to that bookmark. 
So let's go down here to the first little piece of poetry. Let's select the first line of that text. To add a bookmark I can do it in a few ways. One is I can click on Document here and then Bookmarks. Then there is an Add a Bookmark button. I can also go to Insert and then select Bookmarks. You can see there's a keyboard shortcut for that. Either one is going to get me to the same place. So I'll hit Add Bookmark and you can see it adds to this list here, that I can always access, with the text that's bookmarked and a page number. I can actually use this to jump around inside the document. Even if you don't add links bookmarks are kind of handy while you're editing to jump around.
If I want to add a link to this I can go ahead and select some more text. In this case I don't have any text here so I'm going to paste some text in. I'll paste in the exact same text. It doesn't have to be. I can have this be any text I want. Then I can select it and go to Format, Add Link. If I select Bookmark then I can select which bookmark to add to it. I can also jump to anything that has a heading style or title style here. So I'm going to choose from Bookmarks the only one that's there. I can go to Bookmark to test it. I can Remove. If I click just off it you can see it's underlined and the cursor will change to a hand if I move off of it.
If I click now while I'm editing I have the ability to Edit, go back into that mode, or I have the ability to go to that Bookmark. However, if I am to Export this, so I'll export it as a pdf, then in the PDF viewer, in this case Preview, I'll see it as a link. If I click it I, of course, don't get the change to edit it, it just jumps right to that. So I can do this with any text in the document linked to any other text.
So in Page Layout mode previously there was no way to link inside the document. But now there is. This is new in Pages version 8.1. So now I can select some text. For instance, I can go down here in this page and I can grab some text here. A reference to another page. I can select that. I don't have to setup a bookmark or anything in advance. I can just go to Format, Add Link, but now Page is the third option. I select that and now I can link to a page by number. I gives a handy little preview here so I can see what it is that I'm linking to. Make it a little bit easier to confirm what I've got. I'll select page 5. Like before I have Remove and Go To Page buttons. I can click off of that and click again and it will go to Edit or Go To Page. I hit Go To Page and it jumps right to that page.
Similarly this allows me, for the first time really, to create a Table of Contents here in Page Layout mode because I can't do a Table of Contents in Page Layout mode. It doesn't let me. It's something for word processing documents. But now I can actually type some text. This is a text box I created on a page and I just put this text here and I can actually select the text. Do Format, Add Link to a Page, then select which page I want it to go to. Now this is a link to that page. So you're selecting everything by page number since in a Page Layout document every single page is its own independent unit.
Now when I export this to a pdf, view it in a PDF viewer. There's that link. I click that and it jumps right to that page. In addition there's that other link I set, which was here in the text. I click that and it jumps right to that page. So this provides you with a great way to add links inside of a Page Layout document in Pages.
You know Apple has another Word Processing app called iBooks Author. These are used to create really advanced books for Apple Books. So you can upload them and sell them through Apple's Store. But it seems like a lot of these new features are features that allow you to do these kinds of advanced books in Pages. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually Pages has all or most of the features and Apple just basically rolls iBooks Author into Pages.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Creating Text Links In Mac Pages”

Louise Kienast

6 years ago

I hope this is not off topic - how does link to mail work? I'm not sure what the purpose is having this in a Pages document. The person receiving the document would have to save the Pages file first, use the link inside Pages to create and compose the email message, why not just use reply to email?

Gary Rosenzweig

Louise: You would usually export the finished document as a PDF. Then when someone downloads the PDF, clicking the link in it would open up a new email message already addressed to the email in the link. So you could have a book author's name link to their email address, or the publisher's name, or a support email address in the text, etc.

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Creating Text Links In Mac Pages

Comments: 2 Responses to “Creating Text Links In Mac Pages”

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