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Links and navigation

How readers navigate your document using PDF links, page thumbnails, and viewer controls.

PDF hyperlinks embedded in your source document are interactive in the viewer. Readers can click links to visit external websites, send emails, or jump to another page within your document. Beyond these embedded links, the viewer provides navigation tools—thumbnails, page controls, fullscreen, and zoom—whose availability depends on the viewer mode.

Your PDF's own hyperlinks—created in your PDF authoring software—are preserved and clickable in the viewer. All four viewer modes support them without additional configuration. Link areas large enough to cover most of a page are ignored: a page-sized link box would swallow every page-turn gesture on that page.

External links — links to websites or email addresses open in the expected way. Only http:, https:, and mailto: links become clickable; every other scheme in the PDF is ignored. HTTP and HTTPS links open in a new browser tab with rel="noopener noreferrer", so the opened page has no handle on the viewer window. Mailto links hand off to the reader's mail client without opening a tab, avoiding a blank browser tab left behind after the handoff.

External links work even when your document is embedded in another site's iframe, such as a WordPress page or Notion database. Other JavaScript-based link techniques fail silently inside sandboxed iframes; EveryPage's real anchor elements survive those restrictions.

Internal links — links that point to another page in the same document become page jumps. Clicking an internal link navigates the reader to the target page in your current viewer mode without any mode change. Internal links work across all four viewer modes consistently.

The viewer provides several ways to move through your document.

Thumbnail rail — Available in flipbook and magazine modes, a toggleable side panel displays page thumbnails at a glance. Tapping a thumbnail jumps to that page. If your PDF includes a table of contents (bookmarks), the rail also shows a Contents tab listing those entries, allowing readers to navigate directly by section.

Page scrubber — Standard, flipbook, and magazine modes place a slider in the toolbar, next to a page counter; it appears only when there is more than one page (or, in magazine mode, more than one spread) to move between. In standard mode, dragging the slider previews pages live and commits the jump on release; in flipbook and magazine modes the jump happens when you release. Swipe mode has no scrubber—it shows a story-style segmented progress bar across the top instead.

Next and previous buttons — Standard mode's arrows step one page. Flipbook and magazine arrows move a whole spread, which is one or two pages depending on the layout: flipbook offers an explicit 1-up/2-up toggle on wider screens, and magazine uses spreads except on narrow screens, where it falls back to single pages. Swipe mode has its own previous/next affordances at the edges of the card.

Deep links to a page — You can open a document at a specific page by appending #page/N to its URL. Opening /embed/abc123#page/5 takes the reader directly to page 5 when the document loads, and the hash updates as the reader moves through the document, so copying the address bar always shares the page on screen.

Zoom

Flipbook and magazine modes offer zoom controls in the toolbar: +/− buttons that step by 0.5×, hidden on narrow screens. Pinch-to-zoom (and ctrl/cmd-scroll) works in flipbook, magazine, and swipe modes; while zoomed in, dragging pans the page. Zoom ranges from 1× (fit-to-page) to a maximum of 3× in every mode that supports it. Zooming scales the page overlays with the page—hotspots and PDF link boxes stay glued to the content they sit on. The watermark overlay is painted over the whole viewer rather than the page, so it does not scale with zoom.

Standard mode has no zoom control of any kind. It fits each page to the width of the viewer and re-renders when the container resizes.

Fullscreen

Flipbook and magazine modes put a fullscreen button in the toolbar; swipe mode has a floating one in the top-right corner, since it renders no toolbar. Standard mode has no fullscreen control. Fullscreen is particularly useful on phones and tablets for a more immersive reading experience.

In native fullscreen the browser paints only the element that went fullscreen, so anything outside it disappears. EveryPage therefore fullscreens the whole viewer wrapper rather than the page canvas: the page content, watermark, reader annotations, call-to-action button, logo, and EveryPage badge all live inside that wrapper and stay visible and correctly positioned. Media hotspot players (video, image, audio) and the swipe-mode call-to-action sheet mount inside it too, so they are not clipped or hidden. The reader-action rail—the reader-feedback and read-receipt buttons—sits outside that wrapper and is not shown while fullscreen is active.

PDF embedded hyperlinks are different from interactive hotspots, which are rectangular regions you draw yourself in EveryPage. Both are clickable, but they serve different purposes:

  • PDF links come from your source document and are fixed to the content. Readers can click them without any special setup. Taps on them are recorded, but there is no report for them yet—only hotspot and call-to-action taps are surfaced in readership today.
  • Hotspots are defined by you in EveryPage after upload. You draw each region and configure its action (open a link, jump to a page, or play media). Hotspots are a Pro feature; PDF links are available to all plans.
  • Viewer modes — Choose how your document is presented (standard, flipbook, magazine, or swipe)
  • Interactive hotspots — Draw custom clickable regions for links, page jumps, and media
  • Watermarking — Add a watermark overlay to your document
  • Embedding — Embed your document on another website