Why Are My Hyperlinks Still Working?
Jacob wrote to us with a problem he was having with a file: he was having trouble with some hyperlinks and so had deleted all the hyperlinks in his document… but the hyperlinks kept working in his exported PDF files! Why, he asks, won’t those hyperlinks stop working?
In this case, the problem is probably not corruption or anything terrible. In fact, it doesn’t really have anything to do with InDesign at all! Rather, it’s probably just a new(ish) feature in Acrobat. When “Create Links from URLs” is turned on in the General pane of Acrobat’s Preferences dialog box, it’s constantly looking for text that looks like it might be a Web address. Even email addresses are fair game, so if it sees an email address, it automatically treats it as though it had a mailto: link on it.
pdfhyperlinks
If it bugs you, go ahead and turn that preference off in Acrobat or break up the URL on your InDesign page so that it fools Acrobat.
David,
I did what you said, and althouigh it fixed the “mailto” problems it also disabled other web links that I had set up and should have been working? It looks like its a all or none kind of deal. Either way, thanks for the help, I appreciate that.
Disiabling “Create Links from URLs” in Acrobat will only turn off the automatic hyperlinks; it shouldn’t disable links you have created in InDesign’s Hyperlinks palette. Do you have InDesign links that aren’t working any longer?
Yes, in the document I sent over there were 4 links in a table at the bottom of the page that I thought had been set up correctly and weren’t working. Maybe I was doing something wrong?
Jacob, when I tried your file, it worked fine (the links at the top don’t link anymore but the links at the bottom do). Perhaps you forgot to turn on the Hyperlinks checkbox in the Export PDF dialog box? It is easy to make that mistake, but without that, no hyperlinks appear in the PDF.
Note that in the sample file you sent, there are two frames on top of each other at the bottom, so that might cause some problems, too.
That was it, cant believe I didnt see that check box “hiding” there.
Thanks!
I have a simlar problem and nobody seem to be able to help even tho it seems simple. So indesign (or acrobat?) detects likns. That’s fine by me but while they are clickable they’re still the same color as the rest of the text. I somehow want to change the color for all instances considered links (being clickable). I’m looking for some kind of global setting, not the option to alter the link color one by one in the text. Any suggestions?
No, I don’t think there’s any way to change their color automatically. You could do a find/change in InDesign to apply a color or a character style, though.
FYI… In Acrobat 7 the preference is labeled ‘Automatically detect URLs from text’.
Bob Levine recently pointed out a great trick to stop hyperlinks from getting converted in Acrobat: Put a discretionary line break in the middle of them (in cs3 you can choose Type > Insert Break Character > Discretionary Line Break). I was skeptical, but it does seem to work!
I’m losing my mind.
I have a PDF created with ID CS3.
One hyperlink to a web site works perfectly.
One returns “Acrobat does not allow connection to…” (But in ID/hyperlinks panel, the go to URL arrow goes where it should.)
One insists on trying to open the link as a file on my desktop (again, ID -> URL works.)
All appear to be identical in every way.
Wassup with this?
HW