Hyperlinks overview

Add and manage content

One of the key features of Help and Web output formats is the ability to link from one topic to another, and to external files and web pages. You'll use Author's hyperlink object to create those links, and you may combine internal and external targets in the same link. A hyperlink has three parts:

  1. The source of the link, or hot spot, inserted into a topic. This tells Author which text to link from.
  2. The hyperlink object. This tells Author how the link will behave, including whether to make the link into a jump or a popup.
  3. The target topics or external files. You can have many targets for each link. You can create a hyperlink that has targets in many books, and then reuse it in many different documents. For internal jumps, when you publish your document's outputs, only jumps to topics within the same document are included.

    Note: Author only supports internal jumps to a target that is a whole topic, rather than specific text within the topic. If you want to link to subheadings, you'll need to break your target topic into separate topics.