[pdftex] where to get help

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Christopher Charles
Lanz<lanzcc at potsdam.edu> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I have recently begun using LaTex as published by MikTex. I have succeeded
> at figuring out most of what I need.
>
> I am also using the pdfTex that is installed with the MikTex package. Some
> of it seems to work the way it's supposed to. As long as I avoid anything
> complex it creates pdf's successfully.
>
> Although I have here "The LaTex Web Companion" and the pdfTex Manual on
> line, I am unfortunately unable to persuade a certain essential feature to
> work. I need to create active links in the final PDF document - just to
> navigate within the document.

Please look at the hyperref package.  I can only guess that you are trying to
use the low-level pdftex primitives directly.  Hyperref provides a simpler user
interface to the low-level capabilities for pdflatex.  There are other packages
intended for specific types of documents -- a web search might help find
something for the type of document you want to create.

> I have tried to find example LaTex document code that uses this feature
> but have failed. I cannot even get \pdfdest to exist without producing
> errors. Of course, since it always creates errors, I cannot tell even if I
> have the syntax right.

Please post a minimal example that demonstrates the problem.

> Can you direct me to unambiguous examples of the use of active links?

There are many pdf documents in the MiKTeX documentation directories that
were created with pdftex, and many more on the web.  It may help if you can
identify an existing document that has the features you need.  For example,
hyperref.pdf was created using pdflatex with hyperref and has links from the
table of contents to the sections, and also for footnotes.  The sources for
hyperref are in hyperref.dtx.  The package also includes a number of test files
that may provide helpful examples.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia