Our system supports graphical hyperlinks on images and text hyperlinks in RTF text.
Our front-end allows us to mark certain areas of a graphic as hot spots. When the user clicks on a hot spot, a hyperlink is activated and a screen is launched. Adding the hyperlinks to the graphics requires the author to use a tool we created to mark the hot area on the graphic and specify which screen to display in response to a click on the marked area.
Our front-end allows the user to launch any screen from hypertext links in RTF text. To add these hyperlinks we use the following process:
1. During the preparation of the content, the text destined to be hyperlinked is marked with a distinctive style or character sequence.
2. During the automatic tagging of the content, the name and destination of the cross reference, illustration or other hyperlink destination is derived from the marked text and formatted for later inclusion in the database.
3. During compilation, the marked text is reformatted so that the application will recognize it as a hyperlink and is logged in the Hypertext table in the database.
More information about how hypertext links are compiled into the database is provided later in this paper.