Open another pdf file at referenced label/page

Question

I am having two documents, call them A and B. I want to make several cross-references from file A to file B and by clicking on the hyperlink, I want to open file B at the respective page.

In my preamble of file A, I created a short command to make the hyperlink and the reference (separately):

\usepackage{xr-hyper}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\externaldocument[B-]{B}
\newcommand{\test}[2][Seite]{\href{file:B\#page.#1}{also see in File B S.\pageref{#2}}}

As an example, in the document, I have...

\begin{document}
\test[11]{B-sec:aSectionInFileB}
\end{document}

... which works properly. When I click on the link, file B opens at page 11 as specified in the brackets [].

But the thing is, I don't want to specify the page number manually for every reference, but rather "take it from the \pageref command" so that any changes made to document B do not require me to change the page numbers manually. I already tried out to put \pageref{} into brackets [], but apparently this won't work. I found a solution here, but I think it is even less convenient than doing it manually.

Is there any simple automatic way of doing this?

Answer 1

Something like this perhaps?

Using \getpagerefnumber{foo} (package refcount) will provide the page number where the foo label has been placed. A better approach (in my point of view) for the page.3 syntax is to use page=3 etc. as key-value for the optional argument of the \testme command.

I think, it should work as named destination too!

\documentclass{article}


\usepackage{refcount}
\usepackage{xr-hyper}
\externaldocument[B-]{B}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\newcommand{\testme}[2][B]{%
  \href[pdfnewwindow=true,page=\getpagerefnumber{#2}]{file:#1}{also see in File #1 S.\getpagerefnumber{#2}}%
}

\begin{document}
\testme{B-sec:aSectionInFileB}
\end{document}

B.tex:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blindtext[10]
\section{A section}\label{sec:aSectionInFileB}
\blindtext[10]

\end{document}