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Is it possible to draw linkable textboxes / text with a script?

2010-07-09 07:53:56

Script Kitty

Registered: Jul 9 2010

Posts: 19

Answered

I have to link a series of technical drawings together, however, the links must be a small text-box or text below the part id. Is there a way to (once a certain part id is found) draw a box/text a certain amount of space below it and make that box or text a hyperlink?

Example before (excuse my poor ascii approximation):

___PART ID___
| |
| |
| |
| |
----> |___________|------------>

Example after:

___PART ID___
| link1 link2 |
| |
| |
| |
----> |___________|------------>

2010-07-09 08:14:45

UVSAR

Registered: Oct 29 2008

Posts: 1357

the doc.addLink() method allows you to create links via scripting, but it's not trivial. In the SDK there's an example (example 2 on the addlink() page) where we look for a particular word and draw a link around it, that you can probably use as your starting point. Look at example 1 on the same page for the idea behind getting the link to do something other than opening a URL.

2010-07-09 08:20:39

Script Kitty

Registered: Jul 9 2010

Posts: 19

Great, most of my problem is solved. But is it possible to draw a link a set distance from text found in a document?

2010-07-09 08:40:39

UVSAR

Registered: Oct 29 2008

Posts: 1357

Yep - look at example 2 in the SDK. It finds the bounding rect* of the word and then uses it to tell the link where to appear, so you can add something to the rect's values beforehand to offset the positon.

*A rect is just a 4-value array containing [upper-left x, upper-left y, lower-right x, lower-right y] in rotated user space.

2010-07-09 08:46:12

Script Kitty

Registered: Jul 9 2010

Posts: 19

Thanks for the help :)