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I'm preparing a beamer presentation and I'm using hyperlinks for the first time; When I do something like:

\href{name_file_to_open.pdf}{here I put a link to a figure which is working well}

It works just fine and open the .pdf document; Problem is I can't return to my presentation, cause when I close the linked.pdf I close it all. (I try this with movie and indicating an area to the file open like \href[width=3cm,height=2cm] but then it doesn't work)

Can anyone please has any suggestion to this problem?

Joseph Wright
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Maria
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    Hyperlinks in presentations are a very bad idea in general. Why don't you simply put all content that you want to show in one PDF file, instead of splitting it in two parts? – Jukka Suomela Sep 12 '11 at 09:42
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    This would depend on the PDF viewer you're using, I suppose. When I tried this with Sumatra, it opened a new window with the second PDF, which I could then close or Alt + Tab back to the presentation. In Adobe Reader however, the linked PDF "took the place of" the old PDF, so closing that didn't work. There was a setting in Reader though to avoid that problem, by making hyperlinked PDFs open in a new window: Edit --> Preferences --> Documents. Second checkbox from the top, something about opening links in same window. Edit: So the question is, which viewer are you using? – Torbjørn T. Sep 12 '11 at 09:45
  • Yes, that´s it - many thanks! (actually it´s not enought open docs in different windows; we must also select open links in different windows) – Maria Sep 12 '11 at 10:57

2 Answers2

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Try using the pdfnewwindow option of the hyperref package:

make links that open another PDF file start a new window

You can either use it directly with the \href command

\href[pdfnewwindow]{name_file_to_open.pdf}{here I put a link to a figure which is working well}

or change the default behaviour for all links by specifying

\hypersetup{pdfnewwindow}

Now the existing document isn't "overwritten" by the new PDF file any more, so you can simply return to the presentation by closing the linked document (tested with Adobe Reader X).

diabonas
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Personally, I think a hyperlink to an external image is a good idea. The only problem is the viewer! The most common viewer, acrobat reader CAN go back, but it usually does not display the required UI element!

If you right click on its toolbars and choose "Further tools", you get screenshot of acrobat toolbar selection

Simply activate the left and right arrows (at the bottom of the screenshot). These allow you to switch backward and forward.

I tried them out: it works for both links inside of the document and links to external documents.

Other viewers may also supports forward- and backward buttons.

Note that these switches are also extremely useful to navigate in highly crossreferenced LaTeX manuals as those of tikz or pgfplots.

Christian Feuersänger
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  • A useful feature indeed! Unfortunately, it works only for internal links with my Adobe Reader (tested with the latest version 10.1.1.33, Windows) - if the current document is "overwritten" by an external PDF file, I can't go back to the original file. – diabonas Sep 17 '11 at 11:26