I am working on a translation, where the original text is in a large PDF (500 pages).
It would be great if I could put a link to the appropriate page of this PDF into each of my Scrivener pages/documents which contain the different parts of the translation. Document References being the obvious place for this.
My default PDF viewer (PDF X-Change viewer) handles that very nicely. The necessary command would look like something like this:
c:\pdfxcview.exe /A “page=230” mysourcefile.pdf
I have tinkered for a long time but did not succeed to create an external Reference in Scrivener that does this. I can put a “file:///…” command into an external link, but this does not pass on the necessary parameters, it can either open just the PDF viewer (file:///c:pdfxcview.exe), or the pdf using the default viewer, but once I add parameters to pass the page number it does not work.
Answering my own query: One fast-and-dirty way to do it is with AutoHotKey. I wrote this amateurish script (workaround for the pesky quotes within the command line):
^!F5::
clipboard =
Send, ^c
ClipWait, 2
If ErrorLevel
{
MsgBox, Page number copy to clipboard failed
Return
}
FileDelete, c:\tempcmd.txt
FileAppend, c:\pdfxcview.exe /A "page=, c:\tempcmd.txt
FileAppend, %Clipboard%, c:\tempcmd.txt
FileAppend, " “C:\Dropbox\source.pdf”, c:\tempcmd.txt
FileRead, pdfcommand, c:\tempcmd.txt
Run %pdfcommand%
Return
Now I put the corresponding PDF page numbers into the Scrivener text wherever appropriate, and when I want to call the PDF, I mark the page number and then press Ctrl-Alt-F5: PDF is opened in PDF X-ChangeViewer at the correct page. I can also annotate and highlight the source PDF, as it stays in the Dropbox folder.
Works. Still, a solution within Scrivener would be more elegant!