creating a mailto: hyperlink when the email has a dot before the at ( @) sign

..and forgot to mention that I am using Acrobat 7 for distilling the file, so now following Shlomo's explanation understand why it was creating only a partial email address. Many thanks again!

Many thanks Shlomo, Scott, Sheila! The mailto syntax was incorrect in the FrameMaker file. --Now it's correct and works like a charm.
I had actually tried to find information on the syntax for emails and couldn't find it in the OLH [neither in the Hypertext commands topic nor in the Setting up links to URLS subtopic]. So I'm extremely grateful for your help!

Here is my guess: The "message URL mailto:xxx.yyyy@zzz.com" hypertext marker is either not present in your FM file or is not processed by FrameMaker (which could happen if the syntax is incorrect, the marker type is not hypertext or Acrobat Data is turned off). And you are using Acrobat or Reader 7 to display the PDF.

Starting with Acrobat and Reader 7, there is a preference of "Automatically detect URLs from text" (Edit > Preferences, General; in version 8 it's called "Create Links from URLs"). When this is enabled (default), e-mail and web addresses present in the text are interpreted as links when the PDF is displayed (without any links defined in the authoring program). Acrobat 7.x interpretation of e-mail addresses is incorrect -- the presence of a dot, an underscores or a hyphen disturbs the address (so, as in your case, John.Doe@company.com is interpreted as Doe@company.com).

This was fixed in Acrobat/Reader 8, so if you display the same PDF in that environment the interpreted link will be OK. Nevertheless, I recommend adding/checking the hypertext link in FrameMaker, so that a "real" e-mail link will work as expected with all versions of Acrobat/Reader.

Shlomo Perets

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Hi Donna...

I haven't tried this, but you may be able to use hex notation for the dot character ..

xxx%2Eyyyy@zzz.com

Maybe...

...scott

I just tested it with FM 7.2 and with Acrobat 7, and the standard link worked fine:

-- using a hypertext marker
-- the marker text is:
message URL mailto:xxx.yyyy@zzz.com

When Distilling be sure to have Generate Acrobat Data turned on.

How are you creating the link, and how are you distilling, and with which version of Distiller?