User Manual UDO > The UDO syntax > Hypertext commands > Links Index

External links

With the (!xlink) (external link) and (!url) commands you can insert links to (parts of) other documents, net sites or hypertexts. The difference to the upper command: UDO doesn't adjust special chars of the link destination. The tilde isn't a non-breaking space in the link destination, too.

UDO:	`(!xlink)` *`[UDO] [:\udo.hyp]`**
ST-Guide:	@{"UDO" link "*:\udo.hyp"}
UDO:	`(!xlink)` `[Atari] [http://www.atari.com]`
HTML:	Atari
UDO:	`(!xlink)` `[UDO] [Titel@d:/winhelp/udo.hlp]`
WinHelp:	{\uldb UDO}{\v Titel@d:/winhelp/udo.hlp}
else:	UDO (or Atari)

How to use external links inside an HTML file is descriped in the following example:

Before:

""(!xlink [Yahoo] [http://www.yahoo.com])!.."" (!nl)
""(!xlink [Web.de] [http://web.de])!..""

Afterwards:

Yahoo...
Web.de...

Hints:

You have to use existing topic names for Windows Help. A topic name must contain only numbers and characters form the alphabet. All other characters will be converted by UDO.
You should use *:\ at the beginning of an external link for the ST-Guide to tell it to look for the hypertext in all directories you defined with PATHS in your ST-GUIDE.INF.
Using the switch called !no_xlinks you can suppress the conversion of external links. This is useful if you wrote a source file especially for HTML and you want to make a version for Windows Help or ST-Guide, where the external file would make no sense.