I am trying to make a seamless process for creating engineering part drawings that have interactive balloons that will somehow go to the part you clicked. A part balloon contains a part number, I want the user to be able to click that part number to go to that selected part number drawing. What I am asking help for is if anyone knows or has any recommendations how to achieve this.
We use Solidworks as our CAD software. Currently we create save a copy of the drawing in Solidworks to PDF and that is then converted to an enlarged PNG programmatically. There are currently no hooks, anchors or tags associated with the PNG. The PNG is displayed on our parts browsing website. Currently you cannot interact with the drawing on the webpage other than zooming in and out.
I can change that process to whatever will work, but it needs to be almost completely automated. Any ideas would be appreciated.
So far I have looked into adding JavaScript to the actual PDF document programmatically, but I do not fully understand the interaction between web based JavaScript and PDF JavaScript. There is not much online either, or else I couldn't find it. I have also looked into adding links to the PDF, but i cannot get it to open in the current iFrame when a user clicks a link on the PDF, where i would normally user target="_self" to mitigate this. Please let me know if I can clarify something, as there is a lot of information and it would be overwhelming to write on here.
