Latest revision as of 21:31, 14 July 2018

This is Chapter 12 of Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3.x, produced by the OOoAuthors group. A PDF of this chapter is available from this wiki page. The PDFs are up to date for the second edition of the book, but not all of the wiki pages for this chapter have been updated yet.

Introduction

This chapter describes how to do the following in Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress:

• Create hyperlinks within a document and to other documents such as web pages, PDFs, and other files.
• Save documents as web pages (HTML documents).

When creating a document that you plan to deliver as a web page, you need to consider the following:

• In an HTML document, hyperlinks are active (clickable) but other cross-references inserted by OOo are not active links.
• An object such as a image is saved as a separate file. However, if that object has been placed in a frame (for example, with an associated caption), it is not saved and does not appear in the HTML document; instead, the name of the frame appears.

Relative and absolute hyperlinks

Hyperlinks can be stored within a file as either relative or absolute.

A relative hyperlink says, Here is how to get there starting from where you are now (meaning from the folder in which your current document is saved) while an absolute hyperlink says, Here is how to get there no matter where you start from.

An absolute link will stop working only if the target is moved. A relative link will stop working only if the start and target locations change relative to each other. For instance, if you have two spreadsheets in the same folder linked to each other and you move the entire folder to a new location, a relative hyperlink will not break.

To change the way that OOo stores the hyperlinks in your file, select Tools > Options > Load/Save > General and choose if you want URLs saved relatively when referencing the File System, or the Internet, or both.

Calc will always display an absolute hyperlink. Don’t be alarmed when it does this even when you have saved a relative hyperlink—this 'absolute' target address will be updated if you move the file.

Make sure that the folder structure on your computer is the same as the file structure on your web server if you save your links as relative to the file system and you are going to upload pages to the Internet.

When you rest the mouse pointer on a hyperlink, a help tip displays the absolute reference, since OOo uses absolute path names internally. The complete path and address can only be seen when you view the result of the HTML export (saving the spreadsheet as an HTML file), by loading the HTML file as Text, or by opening it with a text editor.