Add Links to PDF

A link in a PDF is not part of the text. It is a separate, invisible rectangle laid over the page — the PDF format calls it a link annotation — with an instruction attached: go to page 14, open this web address, start an email. That is why you can make a heading, a logo, a footnote number or a whole paragraph clickable without changing a single character of the page itself. With oMyPDF you simply drag that rectangle where you want it, the same way you would select an area in an image editor.

Links come in two families. Internal links, sometimes called jump links, move the reader to another place in the same document: a chapter, an appendix, a figure, the glossary. External links leave the document: they open a website in the browser, start a new message in the reader's mail app, or dial a number on a phone. You pick the type after drawing the box, and you can change it at any time before you save.

For internal links you also decide where the reader lands. “Whole page” shows the full target page. “Page width” fills the screen with the page and scrolls to a height you choose. “Exact spot” keeps the reader's zoom and lands on the point you click — useful when the thing you are pointing at sits halfway down a dense page. A pin on the target page shows the landing spot while you edit.

Because these are standard link annotations, they behave the same in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, the PDF viewers built into Chrome, Edge and Firefox, macOS Preview, and the common mobile PDF apps. By default the boxes are invisible, so the page looks exactly as it did; if you want readers to notice them, give a link a thin outline, a dashed box or an underline in the colour of your choice.

Most reports, manuals, theses and contracts already have a printed contents page — it just doesn't do anything when you click it. Choose “My PDF already has a contents page” and oMyPDF finds the page for you, reads every entry and its page number, and turns each line into a link. It copes with dotted leaders, right-aligned numbers, titles that wrap onto a second line and roman-numeral front matter.

The tricky part is that the number printed in a contents page is rarely the page's position in the file. A cover, a title page and eight pages of preface push everything along, so “Introduction … 1” really means the eleventh page of the PDF. The tool works this out from the document's own page labels or from the numbers printed in the page footers, then checks that each entry's title actually appears on the page it chose, nudging by a page when it doesn't. You see every match before anything is added, with any doubtful ones flagged so you can type the right page.

No contents page? Choose “My PDF has no contents page” instead. The headings are detected from their size, weight and numbering — running headers and page numbers are ignored — and listed for you to tick, rename and arrange into levels. oMyPDF then draws a clean contents page with dotted leaders and page numbers, inserts it at the front or after the cover, and wires every line to its heading. The same entries can be written as bookmarks too, so the reader's sidebar matches the page.

Documents exported from older software, or assembled from scans that were later OCR'd, are full of addresses that look like links but are just text. Smart links reads every page and lists each web address and email address it finds — including a long address that wraps onto the next line, which becomes one link covering both pieces. Tick the ones you want and they are added in one go.

Cross-references get the same treatment. Phrases such as “see page 12”, “pp. 4–6”, “Seite 12”, “página 7” or “voir page 3” are recognised in several languages and linked to the right page, using the printed page numbers rather than the physical ones. Statistics like “p < .05” and footers like “page 3 of 10” are deliberately left alone.

When a document has no selectable text at all, because every page is a picture of paper, the detectors have nothing to read. You can still draw links by hand, or send the file to OCR PDF first and come back to link it automatically.

Every link already in your PDF is loaded into the editor and listed by page, so you can fix a broken web address, point a jump at a different page, move or resize the clickable area, or delete links you no longer want. Links that do something oMyPDF can't edit — opening another file, for example — are kept exactly as they are unless you delete them.

To strip every hyperlink from a document, use Remove all links. This also clears links the editor could not read, which is the reliable way to get a clean file before printing, archiving or sending a PDF that should not send readers anywhere.

Nothing you leave untouched is rewritten: an original link you didn't change is saved byte for byte, along with its appearance and accessibility tags, and form fields, comments and signature fields on the same page are left in place.

Internal links point at a specific page object, so add them as the last step. Tools that rebuild a document — merging, splitting, reordering, inserting or compressing pages — can leave earlier jump links pointing nowhere. Assemble and shrink the final document first, then link it. Web, email and phone links are more forgiving and usually survive those operations.

A digitally signed PDF is a special case: any change to the file, including new links, makes the signature show as invalid, so oMyPDF warns you before saving one. If both matter, add the links before the document is signed.

Your file is opened and edited in your browser. When you save, PDFs up to your device's limit (around 60 MB on a typical computer, less on phones) are written in the browser and never uploaded. Larger files are sent over an encrypted connection to be written on our server, which counts as one of the free plan's daily premium conversions, and they are deleted automatically within an hour. Your work in progress is saved on this device only, so a refresh doesn't lose your links.