We're looking to improve our help system in Filemaker. We think the best solution is to have the relevant page in our pdf manual open when help is invoked for a button or layout. My question: is there a way to tell Preview (the pdf viewer app in OSX, not the Filemaker mode) to go to a certain page once we tell the finder to open the doc via applescript? I'm reading that Preview is not fully Applescript supported, so not sure if its possible. Any other simple solutions to this would also be appreciated. We really don't want to embed the help system in Filemaker at this point unless there is no other choice.

You can open PDF via FM web viewer.

So you just point address (calculation) to necessary PDF (better is to keep all Help PDF's in one folder together with corresponding FM file).

I don't have a solution to navigating to a page in the PDF document, especially a cross-platform one.

But if you choose to provide your documentation as a series of linked HTML files in a local folder instead, you gain a lot of flexibility. Break up the content into different files according to your cross-referencing needs. Instead of jumping to a specific page in the single PDF document, you would open up a specific HTML file for that section.

There are pro's and cons, of course, to shifting to a different documentation format. HTML does have its limitations.