Creating Deep Links With Hook: A Worked Example

This is a guest post by Luc P. Beaudoin, an adjunct professor of Cognitive Science and Education at Simon Fraser University and the developer of
Hook and
mySleepButton.

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In a previous blog post, I explained how to create deep links to a PDF using PDFpenPro and Hook. 

Deep links created with Hook don't just direct you to a PDF, they scroll to a specific location within the PDF. This saves you time, because PDFs are often long.

Another advantage of Hook's deep links is that, unlike web links and traditional file links, they continue to work even when the document is moved or renamed.

We created a tutorial and a worked example to help you experience Hook first-hand. To follow along, you’ll need to have PDFpenPro installed and to follow these steps:

1. Download Hook 

2. Click the gear icon on the top right and choose Preferences

3. In Hook's General Preferences tab, uncheck Reveal hook://file link targets in Finder (rather than opening them)
to enable the deep links to open

4. Download the worked example (zip file) from CogZest 

In this tutorial, we will be hooking (linking) a document to the PDF titled Mental Perturbance.pdf
(included in the zip file you just downloaded). 

To hook the two documents, do the following:

    1.    Open the Mental Perturbance.pdf in PDFpenPro

    2.    Invoke Hook (⇧⌘space)

    3.    Click on the title

    4.    Select Hook to New… from the Title menu.

5. Hook will show you note-taking apps on your Mac. For this exercise, choose Pages.

Tip: Alternatively, you can use ⌘N to create a note in your default note app.

Hook will:

    1.    Create a new document

    2.    Name it after the PDF (for example, “Mental Perturbance.pages”)

You can now invoke the PDF from your Pages document via Hook and vice-versa. Through Hook, you can quickly navigate between files.

Note: Hook "hides" after you use it, just like Spotlight on Mac.

• With the original PDF open, invoke Hook (⇧⌘SPACE) and double-click on the hooked link to access the notes document
• Repeat this step in the linked document

Deep linking helps you identify the key content in a paper, thereby distilling it to its essence. By adding deep links to your notes and flashcards, you make key passages in a PDF easily accessible. 

This saves you time and helps you master the document. In our next post about Hook and PDFpenPro, we’ll dive deeper into how you can use Hook to master the content in PDFs.

To learn more about Hook and deep linking, check out Deep Linking to PDFs With Hook and PDFpenPro.