A Hyperlinks Mystery Solved

Mike Rankin

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The InDesign team has done a lot to improve the hyperlinks features in recent months. But one interesting issue I sometimes come across is phantom links listed in the Hyperlinks panel, which do not exist in the document. Like so:

Notice that the panel is saying I have a bunch of hyperlinks in overset text, where the source is listed as “OV”. Now there are just two little problems with this. First, I actually have NO hyperlinks in this document at all. Second, there is NO overset text in the document. So what I’m seeing in the panel doesn’t make a lot of sense.

If I click on the “OV” in the panel to jump to the source of a hyperlink, it takes me to the end of a story. If I look in the Story Editor, the story is totally empty.

Also notice that some of the hyperlinks were applied to groups of objects, and those don’t have any source listed at all. Pretty strange, right?

Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to figure out where these ghostly hyperlinks came from. They were all in text that had been deleted in a story where I’d enabled track changes. So even though the text was not visible in my document, InDesign was still keeping track of it and the hyperlinks in it.

And in fact, if I click on the Show Changes button in the Track Changes panel, I can see all the deleted text in the Story Editor, and the sources of all the now not-so-mysterious hyperlinks.

This makes total sense, since I’d want all those hyperlinks to come back if I rejected the changes that deleted the text. It’s just a little odd to see the sources labeled (or not labeled) as they are in the panel. It would be nice instead to have a label like “TC” for Tracked Change or the like. But for now, at least the mystery of the ghostly hyperlinks is solved.