Broken hyperlinks

Is it happening with any particular kinds of links? Or truly all the links?

A red circle means that InDesign can’t find a URL. A red flag usually means it’s looking for a “text anchor.” If the anchor is in a different InDesign document which isn’t where it is expected, that could certainly happen. I hate using text anchors from one document to another; it can cause too many problems. Much better to have all the documents together in one huge document if you need that kind of thing.

If this is one document, then my guess is that the text anchors are pointing to an earlier version of the document. Perhaps you renamed it? I remember seeing something like this, but it’s been a while since I ran into that problem.

Hi there, following on from the issue above I have a similar one where I regularly rename the file as I work on it each day, just in case our server fails as it did last year and we all lost a month of work (don’t ask!).

When I check in the InDesign file, right click on the link, choose edit hyperlink, choose go to destination, it works, but still has the red dot. And when exported the hyperlink works just fine in the pdf.

Asking it to refresh changes nothing.

Even going to edit the hyperlink, selecting none from the list of links, changing it to not shared link (never really understood what this does or its usefulness), then reapplying the link (copying and pasting from the URL of the website) still leaves it as a red dot.

Guidance here would be appreciated.

since they work I am inclined to leave them as is, but it bugs me that I cannot make it work and have green dots.

Thanks, Carey

The red dot means it cannot find the URL. Perhaps your system is blocking InDesign from going out to the web and checking the URL? Is it ever green? Or just green on some links and not others?

Red dots can also occur if a URL goes to a site that requires a subscription, such as an academic journal article, even though it opens a legitimate log-in web page.