I have a 300+ page PDF document which needs to have internal page links added to it to reference other pages in the document. The document is created in Visio, which does not support consistent hyperlink generation in PDF export, so the link generation needs to be done on the PDF itself, not up the chain. This is an annual need, and regularly takes over a week due to the amount of manual labor, time, and checking needed.
The text which is hyperlinked has the same format in every case (e.g., "See Section 8.18 - How to Hyperlink"), and I'm certain this can be automated, as there are commercial plugins which can do this, but they cost hundreds of dollars, and are not able to be used in this case due to restrictions imposed by my employer. Example: https://www.evermap.com/ABAddingHyperlinks.asp
I've been looking through the Acrobat Plugin SDK and it seems doable, but I know there is also a higher level scripting language available for Acrobat. Does anyone have experience working with PDFs or with the Acrobat scripting / SDK tools? Are there open source methods for doing this? I've looked everywhere! Willing to learn. I've looked at Ghostscript (Adding internal hyperlink to a pdf) but what I need is way more than just a Table of Contents, and links can appear in many places on the page with line breaks, so consistency is a challenge.
Bluebeam software's Revu Extreme works pretty darn well, and can be used as a 30 day free trial of all features. Only limitation is that links which extend across a line break (multiple lines of text) do not properly work in Edge or Chrome's PDF viewer, as they don't properly support hyperlinks with multiple click regions. I've submitted a ticket requesting a feature be added to Revu that fixes this, but for now those links need to be manually fixed following the batch link. The process is described here: https://support.bluebeam.com/online-help/revu2018/Content/RevuHelp/Menus/Batch/Link/Batch-Link--T.htm