URL links working in FrameMaker do not work in PDF

[Aviva5EC5]

Hi All,

I have FM documents with links generated using Hypertext (message url). These links work perfectly in FM, but do not work in the PDF documents I generate from the FM documents.

By contrast, the conversion does not break cross-references. These continue working in PDF.

I have checked the optimization options and that didn't help.

Can someone help me please? I'm using FM 2019 15.08.979.

TIA

Aviva

[Winfried Reng]

Hi Aviva,

Do you have other documents for which this works? If yes, what's the difference?

And what happens, when you say that the links "do not work"?

How do you create your PDF?

Do you use Save As PDF? With Distiller or FrameMaker's own PDF engine? (You can check this in the Publishing pod. There is an option Use Acrobat Distiller for PDF Generation.)

When you print to a PostScript file, is Generate Acrobat data in the Print dialog checked?

Best regards

Winfried

[Aviva5EC5]

1. I have the same problem for all of my documents.

2. In the PDF, the hyperlinked text exists, but without the link. 

3. I create my PDF by selecting File > Save As PDF.

4. I don't use Distiller. I tried now but that didn't help.

5. When/how do I print to a PostScript file? 

[Winfried Reng]

Hi Aviva,

What happens, when you click on the potential hyperlink? An error message that the website does not exist or something like this? Does the cursor change to a pointer?

What's the URL? Does it start with www or without?

And what's the text of your hypertext marker?

When you want to create your PDF via a PostScript file, change the printer to Adobe PDF (File | Print Setup). Then click File and Print (or Print Book, depending on what's selected). In the Print dialog activate Print to File and Generate Acrobat Data. When the PostScript file is created, double-click to run the Distiller.

Best regards

Winfried

[Aviva5EC5]

Sorry I wasn't clear. When I create the PDF, hyperlinks that I created in FM with "message URL" simply disappear. Only the plain text remains. No error message, no cursor change. Just no hyperlink.

I use a character tag dedicated to hyperlinks. The URL starts without www, just with "http://".  I tried to add "www." but the same result. The link exists and works in FM, but does not exist in PDF.

For example: message url https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fly

I tried to create the PDF via PostScript, withe the same result. The file is generated, but no hyperlinks.

[Winfried Reng]

Is your marker and the URL on the master page? Does your cursor change to a pointer, even when you are on a body page and press CTRL+ALT? It should.

Is your visible text the URL or some other text?

As your URL does not start with www, Acrobat does not automatically recognize this as an URL to jump to. The FrameMaker hypertext marker has to work.

Our URL changed to something without www just two weeks ago, and I had to change this as well. However, mine works.

When I experimented, I noticed that when I changed the visible text, the hyperlink did not work. Sometimes the target changed to something on my hard drive. Strange. I had to insert the marker again. And it worked more reliably, when I used the Hypertext command in the Insert menu.

Can you delete the text and the marker and insert it again?

[Aviva5EC5]

Seems that deleting the text and re-entering, together with going through postscript, did the trick :-), at least for some of the links. Thanks very much Winfried!!!

Before I close this thread I'd like to make some in-depth trials early next week.

[Aviva5EC5 · Accepted solution]

I found the reason!

FrameMaker uses the message URL command to create a hyperlink.

I used "message url" where "URL" should have been uppercase.

For some reason that still works in FrameMaker but not after the conversion.

Thanks very much Wilfried for your help and patience! truly appreciated!

Aviva

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Hooray, and glad you found your answer.

Using the supplied default strings when inserting hypertext markers can help you avoid that situation in this situations.

One other common one: When creating a Specify Named Destination and creating a Jump to Named Destination pair of markers,  make sure you don't add a trailing space to one, and not the other. Fm will see the "named destination" as different from the other. If you move too quickly when creating, it's easy to click before the provided space in the default text and have mismatched destinations.

-Matt

[Aviva5EC5]

Thanks Matt for your advice! I indeed fell into the Named Destination trap you mention above, but that wasn't difficult to detect because then the link didn't work in FM. The problem I had in this thread did not show itself in FM so naturally I assumed something in the conversion caused it.