To include fancy graphics (say a diagram) in your LaTeX document, a common process is to design the diagram using your favorite graphics designer program, to export the figure as a PDF graphic, and to use:
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{my_figure}
And it works great. Until you'd like to have figures with clickable links. You might even want to have links in your diagram to within the document—maybe a clickable link to a document section, equation, or an item in your bibliography.
The ltxpdflinks
tool provides a simple solution to include a PDF with its
links. It includes ways to encode links to within the document, like you'd
obtain with \ref
and \cite
in LaTeX.
To get started:
Install
ltxpdflinks
:pip3 install ltxpdflinks
Download the
phflplx.sty
file here:
To compile your document:
Drop the file
phflplx.sty
in the same folder as your latex source file, and add to your document preamble:\usepackage{phflplx} \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.lplx,.pdf}
[I'm assuming you're loading the
graphicx
(or alternativelygraphics
) and thehyperref
packages, too.]Note: If you'd like to include also other file types in your document (e.g.,
.png
,.jpeg
, etc.), you need to add them to the\DeclareGraphicsExtensions
argument, too. See doc for the graphicx package.Run the
ltxpdflinks
command-line program for all your PDF files that contain links:> ltxpdflinks myfigure1.pdf
Compile your LaTeX document as usual.
How to include links to other parts of the LaTeX document:
When creating your figure in your favorite drawing software, create a "web hyperlink" with an URL of the following form:
latexref://<type-of-reference>/<reference-target>
For a link to a section, equation, etc. (when you'd use
\ref
/\autoref
/\cref
in LaTeX), uselatexref://ref/<label-target>
where you replace<label-target>
by the LaTeX label of the object you're referencing (the argument of the\label{...}
command in LaTeX).For a link to a bibliographic reference entry (as in
\cite{...}
), uselatexref://cite/<bibtex-key>
, where you replace<bibtex-key>
by the bibliographic reference key you'd like to refer to (the argument you'd use to the\cite{...}
command).These special URL links are automatically converted to LaTeX references by the
ltxpdflinks
utility and thephflplx
package.
Special link conversions:
latexref://ref/XXXXXX → link to XXXXXX label as via \ref{XXXXXX} latexref://cite/XXXXXX → link to XXXXXX citation as via \cite{XXXXXX}
(In the future I'll probably add ways to plug in custom link conversions. The code is extendible & you can add them yourself already if you invoke
ltxpdflinks
via your own python script.)Full support for rotation, scaling and clipping via options to
\includegraphics[...]{...}
Links use the format defined in the LaTeX document (colors & border relevant for link type URL/internal reference/citation as specified via the
hyperref
package.)Simple Python implementation which you can use via your own custom script if you'd like to add link conversions or customize the process in any way.
To get started:
import ltxpdflinks extractor = ltxpdflinks.PdfGraphicLinksExtractor(fname) extracted = extractor.extractGraphicLinks() converter = ltxpdflinks.LatexRefsLinkConverter() converter.convertLinks(extracted) lplxexporter = ltxpdflinks.LplxPictureEnvExporter() lplx_content = lplxexporter.export(extracted) with open('my_ouput_file_will_be_overwritten.lplx', 'w') as foutput: foutput.write(lplx_content)
- Support the possibility (as an opt-in option) to preserve link styling (border, color, etc.) instead if using the document links style?
- Support for internal annotations within the PDF graphic (from one part of the graphic to another)?
- Support for other types of annotations?
- Support for generation of
.pax
files for use with the pax LaTeX package instead?
You can also directly create your diagrams natively in LaTeX using TiKZ. I prefer to prepare diagrams with drawing software, but that's a personal preference.
The pax LaTeX package and associated utility also includes PDF links and annotations using a similar philosophy; it also provides a separate command-line tool to process PDF files before inclusion.
As far as I could tell, pax supports more PDF annotations and preserves link styles. It doesn't seem to provide link conversion to LaTeX references and citations for internal links. It also doesn't seem to fully support rotation and clipping via options to
\includegraphics
. The command-line utility is written in Java.This option has been around for a while, so it might definitely be more stable!