Disable PDF hyperlinks in browser view (Chrome)

Report · Oct 17, 2022

Hey everyone,

Not sure if the following is possible, but I'm hoping someone may have an answer or workaround.

I am working with a lawfirm who are requesting all URLs on PDFs be disabled. All browswers automatically create clickable links for URLs. So I came up with an idea to overide the URLs to a link that go nowhere. For example if a you do nothing to a URL on a pdf and view it on a Firefox, Firefox will recognize that it is a URL and automatically display it as a hyperlink. So, I create a link over the URL and add a NON clicakable link. It works for all browsers EXCEPT Google Chrome. Google chrome overides what I created and makes the URL clicakable. I have even tried replacing the URL with an images and Chrome still recognize them and adds a URL over the image. I'm shocked how good Chrome is with OCR.

Rasterizing is not an option, due to the fact that the document MUST be searchable. There are important numbers and info that needs to be easily searched using the find function.

I'm hoping to find a workaround or a fix to have the URLs stop being recognized by Chrome. We can't ask the end user to change their settings, that is not an option. And in case you are asking why they don't want links clickable in there documents... they have said having a person clicking a link within a document they crated is a liability issue. The client can go to the url on their own. In otherwords, they don't want to be responsible for clients going into a website they provided within the link.

Anyhow, I hope someone has some insight on this, maybe a workaround.

Thank you!

Report · Oct 17, 2022

My first thought was to rasterize the entire document, but if you've already tried changing the URLS to images, and Chrome still recognizes them and makes them as linnks, I don't know what else can be done.

Report · Oct 17, 2022

Yes, and that is another issue. They have to have the PDF be searchable. There are a lot of important numbers and info that need to be easily found. Rasterizing is not an option.

Report · Oct 17, 2022

You can try adding characters that break the links, but the users will naturally ignore (most likely), such as a space in the middle of it, or before and after every period and hyphen.

Report · Oct 17, 2022

If a regular space doesn't work (or looks odd) you can try special characters such as a thin space or a non-breaking space.

Report · Oct 17, 2022

So, we have tried that and it works sometimes. It works in acrobat 100% of the time, but broswers will sometimes still recognize it as a URL regardless if we add space in between the url link. For example attached is a page that has 2 URLs. The first URL (http://emma.msrb.org) has space in between. It is not clickable in Adobe Acrobat. The second one (http://www.buycaliforniabonds.com/) has not been altered or messed with. It is autoamatically clickable in Adobe Acrobat if your prefrences is set up to click on links. BUT!! when you open the PDF document in any browser, the first link is clickable, regardless if we added space in between. (Disclaimer: We added a few sapces in between the first link and then changed the point size to the space to 1 point so it makes it look like it wasn't altered. The client wants it to look the same without any obvious spaces in between). Also, another reason we don't like this method is the time it takes to do this. We had a document that had about 80 links. We are expected to have a quick turnaround with our documents and this is not feasable. Any other ideas you may have? There is gotta be a way to trick chrome that it is not a URL. I'm playing around with layers, but so far no luck.

Attached FILE: https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/37631fc9-fc11-419b-4a1c-bb3e735de078

Report · Oct 17, 2022

You're asking us to guess how Chrome works. We can't really do that. It's a trial-and-error process, unless you get a definite answer from Google about this issue.

Anyway, your request is highly unusual and will probably require quite a bit of work to implement. You need to inform your employer of that and make sure they allocate the resources needed to implement it.