Comments on: Hyperlinks: Now you see ‘em. Now you don’t!

By: James Arneson

James Arneson — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:13:46 +0000

It would be an awesome tip if only all the URL’s were listed in the hyperlinks panel. Alas, they are not in the CS4 version.

By: Jongware

Jongware — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:40:10 +0000

GShannon: you are confusing InDesign’s native hyperlink function with Acrobat’s “Detect Hyperlink” ‘feature’.
Hyperlinks created in ID itself have none of the disadvantages from Acrobat’s shoddy, haphazard implementation.

There are scripts around that look for, and automatically add, hyperlinks in your InDesign document. Only thing you have to remember is to select to include them on exporting to PDF.

By: GShannon

GShannon — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:45:28 +0000

When I export files from ID to PDF, it can identify hyperlinks by the fact that a text string starts with “http://” or even just “www.” (suppose the imported source text did not have links embedded). However, if the link string wraps to the next line in the text flow, the link URL stops at the line break. For essample, suppose the URL “http://www.thisistheurl.com/nextleveldown/docs/finalproof.html” wraps at docs/. In the PDF, so does the target it loads in the browser, which is not a valid URL. Is there a way to avoid that problem without a lot of manual labor in ID’s Hyperlinks panel? There can be loads of these links in a large multilingual document.

By: Kristi

Kristi — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:41:01 +0000

Text surrounding hyperlink– the text not tagged as hyperlink style–does not retain its style color when I change the hyperlink style attributes. Has anyone experienced this. I’ve created many docs this way, and this one is a first.

I’ve created a document with a hyperlink style applied to all hyperlinks. The document exports as a pdf with hyperlinks working beautifully, but my customer wanted a different shade of blue for hyperlinks.When I attempt to change the color of the hyperlink in the style panel, the color of non-hyperlinked adjacent text changes as well. That means select adjacent text is now blue instead of black.

Ideas? Would love to help others if this happens. This can be tough if the document is quite large.

By: KG

KG — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:25:21 +0000

I am publishing pdf files created from IDCS4. I need to be able to turn off weblinks but not globally. I need to be able to pick and choose which ones should be on and not. I tried the preferences in Acrobat but that seems to disable the ones I manually set up. What is the best way for me to get from ID4 to the web with only the weblinks I choose set up as hyperlinks?s Thanks!

By: Kelly Vaughn

Kelly Vaughn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:10:42 +0000

Here’s another neat thing to do with making hyperlinks invisible: inline buttons. By breaking out the hyperlink text into its own text frame, converting it to a button, and applying different states, you can mimic the rollover effect of web pages, but using a PDF.
And because the hyperlink text is now an inline object, there’s no longer that pesky problem of urls breaking in weird places. Of course, this works best if the link text is short. And also, because there’s no way to apply no-break as part of a character style, this will always keep the whole string of link text together
You can also have set the transparency of the different states so that the text interacts with graphics or gradients beneath it. Short of some complicated javascript, I don’t even think that’s possible in standard CSS coding. Here is an example of it:

By: Kelly Vaughn

Kelly Vaughn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:58:25 +0000

Reexport PDF with new placed EPS, giving it a different name. In Acrobat: Document > Replace pages.

By: Evelyn Powers

Evelyn Powers — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:38:31 +0000

I have an eps image placed in a Indesign CS3 document. I saved it as a pdf and inserted hyperlinks to the eps (map of the US) in Acrobat. I have minor edits to the eps but I don’t want to redo all the links in acrobat…any suggestions how I switch out my old map with my new map without relinking?

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:44:25 +0000

I’m a little late to this discussion, but i’m looking for help on how to permanantly disable those visible rectangles. I routinely import text, with hyperlinks, from Word and do not want the visible rectangles. I can turn them off manually, but since i do this nearly every day I invariably forget. Going to view>turn off hyperlinks works for removing the rectangle in inDesign, but when i export to PDF they reappear.

Am i doing something wrong? Should i want the rectangles, but i’m just not saavy enough to know it?

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:27:54 +0000

Jezz, I agree that it’d be better if ID and Acro had more parity for lots of things, including the link style for hyperlinks.

But I think that the only reason Acro offers the Underline style in the Create Link dialog box is because there’s no other way in the program to do that; whereas in InDesign, there are a bunch of ways to do that that are actually much faster and more flexible than Acro’s method.

The best way, IMO, is to create a character style for your text links in InDesign (if you’re bringing them in from Word, they already have a Character Style applied called Hyperlink). In the Character style, turn on the Underline option, and color it/offset it however you’d like.

Then in InDesign’s Hyperlinks panel, select all the links and turn off the rectangles as Sandee describes in the post.

When you export to PDF with links enabled, the hyperlinks appear underlined, just as in InDesign.