Genii Weblog

Mea culpa, sort of, and a hint about anchor links

Mon 22 Jun 2009, 11:10 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
It turns out that IBM has kind of, sort of, dealt with anchor links in iNotes 8.5, if you know the secret incantations and follow the unwritten rules.  Since nobody at IBM has galloped forth to defend their honor, I guess that I must.

OK, the most important ingredient in the secret sauce: set the target of the anchor link to "_self".  This may not be intuitive to most users, so here is a little step by step:

1) Save the email, even though you haven't sent it yet, because you can't create an anchor link until it is saved.

2) Edit - Copy As - Anchor Link... will allow you to name the anchor and will copy the doclink into memory.

3) Go to where you want to use the anchor link, highlight the text you want to use as a link hotspot (you could just paste this as an anchor link, but trust me, that seems to cause more problems than it's worth), and use Create - Hotspot - Link Hotspot, which will automagically paste the link information in, including the anchor.  This is good!

4) Remembering the secret sauce, set the value next to Frame (which in most other places is known as the Target, but not in Notes) to "_self". but without the quotes (which will really ruin your day).

5) Now, so long as you don't mail this to anyone else (since it appears that iNotes doesn't respect the $KeepSent value as it should, although I need to test that further), your anchor links should actually work in iNotes.

So, mea culpa for assuming that IBM had no clue about anchor links.  I didn't recognize what was happening, because iFidelity automatically assumes the "_self" target is intended for self-referential anchor links unless a different actual target is set.

Copyright © 2009 Genii Software Ltd.

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