Update II: There's now a free demo version of the stand-alone tool available. This version is identical to the full tool, but it will only create the first 3 links from the first 3 items in your list.

Update: Now available is a Standalone version of this tool, which runs independently of Acrobat and is therefore much more suited for processing large amounts of files, files with a lot of text in them or long lists of items to link. If you need to use this tool extensively, this is the version for you.


Let's say you have a PDF and you want to link all the instances of your name to your website, or all the times the words "Index" appear to the first page of the file, or even to a index.pdf file located elsewhere on your computer... Doing so would require going over them one by one, creating a link over each one, setting its properties, its action, etc. In short, a pain in the neck...

This is why I created this new tool, which you can use to automatically add links of various types of your PDF files.
The tool will read in an input file, for example a CSV file exported from Excel, with the search terms and the properties for each of those links, and will continue to create those links.

The possible actions the links can perform are:

• Open a web page
• Go to a specific page
• Open a file
• Open a relative file
• Open an attached file
• Go to a named destination

In addition, you can set the following properties for each link:

• Visibility: A visible or invisible rectangle
• Highlight Style: None, Invert, Outline or Inset/Push
• Line Thickness: Thin, Medium, Thick
• Color: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue or Yellow.

When you purchase this tool it comes with the complete specification of how to set up the input file, as well as a sample one.

This tool even comes with a batch process (aka Action), which allows you to add the links you wish to add to multiple files, with just a single click (provided you have the Pro version of Acrobat).