Name It Launcher

The systems integrator solution for PDF on-line help and documentation systems

Name It Launcher is an Adobe Reader plug-in which enables systems integrators to utilise the power of the Acrobat PDF format, and PDF's named destinations, to build PDF on-line help and documentation systems.

Name It Launcher can open PDF files at any named destination in a PDF file.

Systems integrators can integrate this product into their documentation systems.

Name It Launcher is a companion product to Name It, a powerful tool which enables users to create and manipulate named destinations via an Acrobat user interface.

What is a named destination?

A named destination is a destination view of part (or all) of a particular page of a PDF document. This specific view is stored within the PDF with an associated name.

Named destinations thus enable a user to name a view on a page of a document with a text name such as introduction, in a similar way to a bookmark referring to a particular view. But, these named destinations can then be set to be the views of links or bookmarks when Name It is installed.

Some advanced applications such as Adobe FrameMaker will also create and use named destinations for links.

More Details

Name It Launcher is requested to open a PDF at a specific named destination by a connection on a known Unix socket. The file name and destination to open can also be passed via a temporary file, and, on Windows, by a connection to Name It Launcher's DDE server. (Note however, that Adobe Reader provides its own method of opening at a named destination on Windows.)

Name It Launcher implements all the possible destination view types, making it easy to go to a particular named destination in a document.

How can I create named destinations?

There are several ways:

• Named destinations can be created and manipulated easily with Name It, our Acrobat plug-in and companion product to Name It Launcher. This enables named destinations to be created easily via the Acrobat user interface, and in batch.
• DTP packages such as Adobe FrameMaker, and some macro packages (e.g. with Microsoft Word) can create named destinations.
• They can also be created by editing a PostScript file to insert pdfmark commands which Acrobat Distiller will execute. For full details refer to the "pdfmark Reference Manual" which comes with Acrobat Distiller. A simple example which creates a destination called "Page1" which is a fit page view of the first page of the document is:
  
  [ /Dest /Page1
  /Page 1 /View [/Fit] /DEST pdfmark