Skip to main content
Participating Frequently
March 5, 2026
Question

Importing a PDF with hyperlinks into a Frame and having the links work when the Frame file is saved out to PDF again?

  • March 5, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 61 views

My company gets PDFs that we have to insert into our manuals from an outside vendor.  These PDFs have hyperlinks in them that need to work in the final PDF.  We *thought* they were working in the output, but it was just Acrobat identifying URLs.  The PDFs are regulatory and are updated on a frequent basis, so trying to recreate them in Frame probably isn’t an option.

 

Is there a way to save PDFs with the imported PDF links working?  I also tried converting to SVG, but no dice.

 

Thanks.

    2 replies

    frameexpert
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 5, 2026

    When FrameMaker imports PDF pages, it treats them as images and not live PDFs. Therefore, PDF links and form fields don’t survive the import.

    www.frameexpert.com
    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 9, 2026

    And because FM imports one page at a time from PDFs, any attempt to preserve links could expect to encounter intractable problems, starting with page-to-page internal hypertext links in the imported PDF.

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 5, 2026

    What method is being used to import the PDFs (or individual pages thereof)?
    I can think of at least two ways to do it, and they might have different resulting document behavior.

    Jordan_S.Author
    Participating Frequently
    March 5, 2026

    Almost always as File > Import > File and Import by Reference.