Making clickable links to sections with hyperref

Question

I would like to make a word of text, that when clicked upon in the PDF file takes me to some section. I'm using the hyperref package. I rejected \nameref because it produces the section title and I want my own link text. I also rejected \hyperlink because it does not work (no link, does not seem to know the section label as a link target).

What's a good way to do this?

Answer 1

\hyperref is your friend:

\usepackage{hyperref}

%... other code

\section{Hello World}
\label{sec:hello}

\hyperref[sec:hello]{Word of text}

Answer 2

link to a section

hyperref does the job:

\usepackage{hyperref} % import the package

%... other code 

\section{Alice in Wonderland} % a normal section we want to link to
\label{sec:Alice} % this is the bookmark for the links which refers to the last section

% links to the section with the variable name Alice, showing: "Some Displayed Text"
\hyperref[sec:Alice]{Some Displayed Text}

% links to the section with the variable name Alice showing the name of the Section, here: "Alice in Wonderland"
\nameref{sec:Alice}

% Links to the section with the variable name Alice showing the description of the section, here: "section 1"
\autoref{sec:Alice}

Example:

all 3 will link to

Overleaf Example

link to a section by its number

If you really want to link to a section number (not the section with the number XXX) use:

%link to the section with number XXX   
\hyperlink{section.XXX}{Some Other Displayed Text}
%link to the section with the number 2
\hyperlink{section.2}{Some Other Displayed Text}

Be aware that if you add a section so that the section number changes, this link will point to a different section that now has the number specified. I would highly recommend the solution above which is much more resilient to changes.

Answer 3

Hyperref builds section links automatically. You should be able to reference them as section.i where i is the section number. If you wanted to say "Section 3" and link to section 3, it would look as follows:

\hyperlink{section.3}{Section 3}

If you are prone to reorganizing your sections, this is not perfect, and I would advise using one of the above solutions, however, for relatively stable orderings, this is much simpler as it doesn't require adding a \label tag whenever you want a new section.

Testing indicates this also works for other sectioning commands like \chapter (where the reference becomes chapter.1). For nested sectioning commands like \subsection, the reference becomes subsection.1.1.

If you want to reference chapter 3 section 2 you can use the following code:

\hyperlink{section.3.2}{Section 3.2}