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Layout Guide
Advanced Topics
PDF Options

PDF Options

Bookmarks

Create a navigable table of contents in the PDF viewer:

<Bookmark select="'Chapter 1'" level="1"/>
<Bookmark select="'Section 1.1'" level="2"/>
<Bookmark select="'Section 1.2'" level="2"/>
<Bookmark select="'Chapter 2'" level="1"/>

Use open="yes" to expand a bookmark node by default.

Links

Create clickable links with <A>:

<!-- External link -->
<Paragraph>
    <A href="https://example.com"><Value>Visit our website</Value></A>
</Paragraph>

<!-- Internal link (to a mark) -->
<Mark select="'chapter1'"/>
<!-- ... later ... -->
<A link="chapter1"><Value>See Chapter 1</Value></A>

Page destinations

Every page automatically gets a named destination (page-1, page-2, …). You can link to a specific page using the page attribute:

<A page="2"><Value>Go to page 2</Value></A>

This also works in HTML mode (htmlbag) using <a href="#page-2">Go to page 2</a>.

PDF metadata

Set document properties with <PDFOptions>:

<PDFOptions
    author="ACME Corp"
    title="Product Catalog 2026"
    subject="Complete product listing"
    creator="XTS"/>

Viewer preferences

Control how the PDF opens:

<PDFOptions
    displaymode="fullscreen"
    duplex="DuplexFlipLongEdge"
    printscaling="None"
    showhyperlinks="false"/>

Conformance (PDF/UA, PDF/A, PDF/X)

The output conformance is not set with <PDFOptions>. It has to be known before the document is built, so it is configured on the command line or in the configuration file instead, using the orthogonal axes pdfua, pdfa and pdfx:

xts --pdfua 2
pdfua = "2"

For PDF/UA you should also set a meaningful document title (see above); without it XTS emits a placeholder title and a warning. See the Accessible PDF documents chapter for the full workflow.

See also

Slates