Dear Tom, I used to work at Adobe [twice!] and the there's still quite a historical legacy from the good ol' days of "FrameViewer", and when FrameMaker was available on Macintosh, NeXT, SunOS, IBM AIX and more. The "Hypertext" system is one of those legacies, and it probably outdates the internet "hypertext" system.
As a result most [if not all] of the "Open document" functionality should refer to FrameMaker documents, which if you print to PDF, FrameMaker and the Adobe PDF printer [set as the Windows default printer!] will automagically transform any markers such as: openlink document2.fm ... to get Acrobat to make a link to open "document2.pdf" Answering your questions in turn: #1 - Goto URL usage This is a strange "hypertext" command. If you print your document to PDF, Acrobat will have a link to 'address' the operating system to open the specified URL. URLs start with typically http:// or file:// and the address part always uses forward slashes. #2 - forward or backward slash Always use forward slashes in pathnames for FrameMaker document linking. It does work! I advise against using backslashes ... as FrameMaker uses the backslash to specify special characters, such as tab \t - but also, if you edit a marker, you will ALWAYS have to keep doubling the number of backslashes in the UNC [Uniform Naming Convention] pathname, as FrameMaker will keep interpreting them. #3 - See #2 #4 - The history of FrameMaker also means that there's some quirky features or methods involved. In the days when Frame Technologies [and later Adobe] ported FrameMaker to multiple platforms, they standardised on paths to be Unix style - even for Windows and Macintosh, for example openlink /working-folder/examples/document2.fm ... to get Acrobat to make a link to open "/working-folder/examples/document2.pdf" #5 - FrameMaker's hypertext support There's a PDF document on the MicroType web site that gives a good overview: http://www.microtype.com/resources/FMhypertext.pdf