Comments on: Cleaning Up Hyperlinks from Word Text

By: Maria N

Maria N — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:14:48 +0000

This may be old news for ID CS3 users, but I just discovered that in the View menu, you can select Hide Hyperlinks if you want to get rid of the gray boxes. This is much easier than before!
The link to the url is retained when exported to PDF (provided the text is placed, not copied).

By: Preston

Preston — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:50:14 +0000

What if I want to *add* formatting to hyperlinked text? I’m starting the process of adding hyperlinks to a long document and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to automatically apply a hyperlink character style to all hyperlinks *without* manually selecting the text and applying the style. It seems like there should be a menu option in the hyperlinks panel for that kind of thing. Ideas?

By: Jonas

Jonas — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:19:29 +0000

Useful! I was scratching my head over this… Couldn’t find that hyperlink window in InDesign on my own
The cmd-6 shortcut in Word was also really useful!

By: janie

janie — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:59:53 +0000

Thanks SOOOO much for the hyperlink removal tutorial! I got rid of the blue lines but could not, for the life of me, find the menu to delete the “ruled box” bugger. (I only started working in InDesign a year or so ago, being a lifelong Quark user.)

By: mbh

mbh — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 05:02:52 +0000

We recently upgraded to InDesign from PageMaker. Sometimes when I save a new ad as an EPS, it won’t open in the Preview window as a pdf and when placed in Quark it’s just an empty box. Other times it works fine. We receive ad copy by email and save it as text to place in the ad format. Could it be something there or a font problem??

By: Alfred Langen

Alfred Langen — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:43:00 +0000

Thank-you Kazimierz!

I have used the save as function creating a text file. With Word 2003, I can save it as an ASCII file which replaces those smart quotes and dashes with ascii equivalents.

By: Kazimierz Kapusniak

Kazimierz Kapusniak — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:50:38 +0000

I’m not sure whether it’s a menu command or not to be honest, it’s just something that I got told a while back by a colleague!

But yeah, all it seems to do is remove all the stuff that tells Word it’s a hyperlink, leaving you with just the text.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:14:37 +0000

Thank you, Kazimierz, Ctrl-6 (Command-6 on a Mac) is fantastic! What is that doing, simply removing links in Word? Is it a shortcut for a menu command (which)?

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:56:49 +0000

Or, select all hyperlinks in the palette, click “Hyperlink Options” from the fly-out menu, and set the appearance to “invisible rectangle” to keep the links without the box in PDF format. That’s what we do in MDJ.

Our true Word-ID annoyance is that after six years, InDesign still botches importing Word hyperlinks that have #anchors in them. It gives the text the “Hyperlink” character style, but it does not actually create a hyperlink with the URL, so you get blue text (or whatever your style mandates) with nothing behind it. Even Mac VB in Office 2004 can get to these links, so it’s baffling why InDesign can’t after all this time.

By: Kazimierz Kapusniak

Kazimierz Kapusniak — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:07:49 +0000

One quick and easy way to get rid of all your hyperlinks (and their formatting) in Word is to ctrl-A to select all and then ctrl-6 (not on the numeric keypad). Saves me a lot of messing about!