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Replies
Does it have to be using Regex exclusively?
Adobe Acrobat can convert all hyperlinks automatically if:
- You go to EDIT -->>PREFERENCES--->>GENERAL. In the Basic Tools section there's a tick-box "Create links from URL's"
- NOTE: This works as long as the content of your document is entirely based on plain text. The content can't be encoded, nor be rendered text that was produced via OCR software and layered on top of a scanned image.
- And the text string must be FreeType fonts and the URL type must also conform to this format "https://www.website.com" for example.
- If the URLs are missig that convention (or schema), such as missing the "www" portion it may not detect the URLs and has to be done manually (alse evaluate what happens and how the link would behave if it detects that such links points to a local file)
- If you don't have this setting enabled, then enable it it in the preferences and save the document and close Acrobat.
- When you re-open the PDF in Acrobat you should notice, that even when the content appears as plain text, when the user hovers the mouse pointer over the URL text string, the mouse pointer will turn into the little hand pointing with index finger icon, and also a tooltip yellow banner will pop(visually indicating that TEXT/ HTML conversion tool place) and therefore, clicking on it will take you to that web page.
With those notes in mind, I have to ask, Are you saying that if you have this preference setting enabled it doesn't convert the hyperlinks automaticaly when you open the document in Acrobat?
In my slide below, I just copied this part of my conversion as text using the Edit PDF tool, or just by right-clickng on tmy document and selecting "Edit Text" or "Edit Text & Images". After pasting my text selection, I saved the PDF and closed Acrobat.
The slide below shows the final result after I reopened the document. Hovering the mouse pointer over that string of text reveals that it is now a URL:
In addition, if I were you, instead of saving from FrameMaker to PDF directly, I would rather save your FrameMaker documents to something like Postscript format.
Then open that Postscript file in Adobe Acrobat so it can convert it automatically to PDF and see if in the process of doing this it automatically converts those strings of text to URL automatically.
Say, if this works for you, then yes, you can create a javascript action (not using Regex, of course) using a for loop to get all the URLs in the document and change their appearance; or even play around with the scripting to set the launching action of all the URLs found.
See Example 2 for "addLink" of the Adobe Acrobat SDK JavaScript API Reference, Doc methods, page 232
for (var p = 0; p < this.numPages; p++)
{
var numWords = this.getPageNumWords(p);
for (var i=0; i<numWords; i++)
{
var ckWord = this.getPageNthWord(p, i, true);
if ( ckWord == "Acrobat")
{
var q = this.getPageNthWordQuads(p, i);
// Convert quads in default user space to rotated
// User space used by Links.
m = (new Matrix2D).fromRotated(this,p);
mInv = m.invert()
r = mInv.transform(q)
r=r.toString()
r = r.split(",");
l = addLink(p, [r[4], r[5], r[2], r[3]]);
l.borderColor = color.red;
l.borderWidth = 1;
l.setAction("this.getURL('http://www.example.com/')");
}
}
}
I'm sorry, the terms I used in my original post may have been confusing. We produce a document in FrameMaker which has web links to other documents. We then create PDF and HTML files from the FM file. (For the PDF, we print to post script.) Once the PDF has been created, we have to change many of the weblinks to open-a-file links. In the example below from the PDF version of this publication, the blue words "Scientific objectives" need to open the PDF file for that chapter.
Adobe Acrobat Pro has two preferencen settings that create links from URLs automatically.
The first I would check is "Edit" --->>> "Preferences" --->>> "General" -->>> uncheck "Create links from URLs".
The other settings is also in Preferences--->>> "Convert to PDF".
See slide below and verify if by disabling that setting is actually the workaround you're looking for:
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