Navigating with hyperlinks

During a live slide presentation, it is often helpful being able to jump several slides back to remind the audience of a formula or a picture. You don't want to page through 17 slides to go to that particular slide and back through 17 slides to return to where you were.

Hyperlinks in a PDF file enable you to jump from one slide to any other slide with one mouse click.

The following input file defines two slides. You should imagine that these are two out of a very large number of slides which are not shown here to save space.

One slide contains a \hyperlink command and the other slide contains a \hypertarget command. If you click on the \hyperlink with the mouse, the Acrobat Reader will jump from the current page to the page containing the corresponding \hypertarget.

The \hyperlink{...}{...} command takes two arguments. The first argument (the word "mytarget" in the example below,) is an arbitrary but unique label which associates a hyperlink/hypertarget pair. The second argument (the word "Click here" in the example below,) is the text which will receive the mouse click. That text will be shown in red color, or any other color specified in the hypersetup command; see the sample below.

The \hypertarget{...}{...} command also takes two arguments. The first argument is identical to that of the corresponding hyperlink. The second argument can contain an arbitrary text. In a slide presentation, the second argument has no useful role, therefore it is left empty in the following sample. 

% hyperlinks.tex
\documentclass[pdf,umbc4,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}
\hypersetup{colorlinks=true,linkcolor=red}
\begin{document}

\begin{slide}{Starting slide}

\hyperlink{mytarget}{Click here} to go to the target slide.

\end{slide}

\begin{slide}{Target slide}
\hypertarget{mytarget}{}

Yup, we are there!

\end{slide}

\end{document}

It is difficult to illustrate the dynamic action of hyperlinks with words. I suggest that you download the sample file above, compile, and try it yourself.

Returning to the calling page

Now you know how to jump from page N1 to page N2. But how to you return to page N1? Well, you can page through all the intervening pages to get there, but that's not very professional.

If you are using the Acrobat Reader for your presentation, which most likely you are, then press Control-Left Arrow (that is, hold down the Control key and press the Left Arrow key.) That will take you back to the page that you came from in one single step!

Remark: Yet another way to return to the calling page would be by adding another hyperlink/hypertarget pair that works in the opposite way. Thus you put a hyperlink in page N1 that takes you to a hypertarget in page N2, and put a hyperlink in page N2 that takes you to a hypertarget in page N1. This trick is not as useful as it may look at first. Suppose that you have an important formula on page N1. You want to put links in pages N2 and N3 and N4, each of which takes you to page N1. But once in page N1, we don't know which of the pages N2 or N3 or N4 we are supposed to return to. The Control-Left Arrow method does not have this problem.
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