How to (totally) disable hyperlinks in a PDF?

[Ferencvaros86]

Hello.

Is it possible to export a PDF from InDesign and disable all hyperlinks, so that they are not clickable from any reader at all? 

I do see that there is an export option to not to include any hyperlinks/interactive elements, but that doesn't work everywhere. For example, I can make the link https://www.adobe.com unactive (unclickable) when viewing the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, but if I load the same PDF in the Chrome browser then the hyperlink is active.

[John Mensinger]

Are you exporting as a Print PDF or Interactive?

[Laubender]

Hi @Ferencvaros86 ,

Just tested this. Google Chrome is detecting the hyperlink on interpreting the contents of the text.

You could apply tracking to the text of the link until Chrome will not recognize the text as hyperlink anymore.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

It's an exercise in futility. Acrobat, and indeed, many other PDF readers automatically detect URLs.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Acrobat automatically hyperlinks anything that "looks" like a hyperlink or email. That is under the Acrobat preferences and controlled by the user. 

[Laubender]

Hi @Ferencvaros86 ,

see my sample PDFs I attached. The one that contains the tracking value on the URL text is the one Google Chrome is not able to see a hyperlink address. Also Adobe Reader cannot see it. Not so in the other sample PDF. Just plain text. Exported from an InDesign page to PDF/X-4.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Hi Uwe--a very clever solution. Did you happen to check the minimum amount of tracking necessary? I suspect the current example would be not be desirable to most users.

[Laubender]

Hi David,

could be that the minimum tracking that is needed is tied to typographical factors like the font style.

So the OP should test some values. My sample document uses value 200 as tracking which is huge. But as I tested now, Google Chrome will still detect the URL as URL when tracking is done with 100.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Jumpenjax]

Before saving it as a pdf. In InDesign control click on link and choose remove hyper link.

if when saved in pdf it still lets you go to link, click on it and choose block.

[BobLevine]

How is that going to stop PDF readers from autodetecting the URL?

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

As @BobLevine implied, the auto-detection, and therefore the option to block, is a USER preference.

[BobLevine]

I don't know how much work you're willing to do here, and for the life of me I don't understand supplying a URL but not wanting it clickable, but...if you throw in some hair space glyphs, that should break the autodetection.

[Laubender]

Hi @Ferencvaros86 ,

the alternative for applying a large amount of tracking, maybe value 150 or more, is to insert a special character after every character of text. Or at least some of the characters. One candidate of a special character could be the INVISIBLE SEPERATOR character at Unicode code point U+2063.

I selected the text to enclose the special character at every character selected and changed the text with a GREP Find/Change action.

Scope is Selection.

Find GREP pattern:

(.)

Change GREP pattern:

$1\x{2063}

Test the attached PDF I exported from InDesign.

Google Chrome and Adobe Reader cannot detect the text as URL.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

To repeat Bob Levine's question...

WHY do you want to remove clickable links from a PDF. They are extremely useful to the reader.

[Ferencvaros86]

Thanks for all the replies.

It seems like there isn't a very suitable solution.

The thing is that we (in the company) are providing PDF files on our website, and currently we are exporting a couple of PDF files each day - and for these we could implement a fix through InDesign (I would rather use a special character after every character than using tracking).

However, the main part of the issue is that we already have exported a couple of thousands of PDF files over many years - and it would be a big hassle to edit them all and export them again. It would take ages. In an ideal world it would be great if we could run a script or something similar on all of them at once - with a special "disable hyperlinks" setting.

[Laubender]

@Ferencvaros86 said: "It seems like there isn't a very suitable solution."

Well, if you are looking for a solution that is modifying the already written PDFs this is the wrong forum.

I'd suggest you ask this in the Acrobat User Forum:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/ct-p/ct-acrobat?page=1&sort=latest_replies&lang=all&tabid=all

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

[Tina38163619sjtw]

It's required by the Court that all hyperlinks be disabled and I cannot, for the life of me, get this to work, and unfortunately, I do not know anything about tracking (solution above).  This is insane.  There are links in my doc and when I run the "remove web links," it says it found 0!  

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The problem is most likely what's touched on in this thread — that in the end, it's the PDF reader that is finding and enabling the links, the way email and web systems will do. A link can be dead as a doornail in the document and the PDF export... but the reader finds the correctly formed URL and turns it into a clickable link.

Some readers have options to disable this, I think, but in the end, a document with a valid URL is either a click or a quick highlight-and-click away from linking out to the site. I understand the court does not want live links in a document, but it's not something that can always be controlled any more than putting phone numbers in a document and preventing people from dialing them.

The only solution I can think of is to edit the document or PDF and break the URLs — put a space after the colon, or example. That should prevent the auto-enabling of URLs as links.

Not sure if there is any global command or setting in a PDF that tells readers to not parse links. There might be.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

It's required by the Court that all hyperlinks be disabled and I cannot, for the life of me, get this to work, and unfortunately, I do not know anything about tracking (solution above).  This is insane.  There are links in my doc and when I run the "remove web links," it says it found 0!  

By @Tina38163619sjtw

You might not have any links in the PDF - created by the app that created this PDF - but most of the READERS will try to recognise pieces of text that looks like link - and "highlight" it as a working link. 

There is nothing you can do about it. 

That's not entirely true - you can either play with hidden characters in between the letter of the text that can be seen as a link - or convert to curves - outline - or create pictures and place as a graphic object. 

Or place letters as separate pictures. 

[Viviana27026770s4s2]

Idk if it's too late, but when I dissable the "Optimize Fast Web View" all the links got dissabled as well.
Hope it works for you guys too.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This does not work for me. I just ran a few quick back to back tests, with the following snippet:

That's two plain text strings, and a defined hyperlink (with the URL at top specified).

If "Include Hyperlinks" is not checked at export, the bottom link does nothing. If it is checked, the link is valid no matter what any other settings are.

The two text links remain valid and clickable no matter what settings are chosen, including unchecking "Optimize for fast web view."

I agree with the gist of this topic, that there should be some absolute "kill the links" option, somewhere in all those check boxes.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Converting to curves should disable them permanently... 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, yeah, but for body text or something like it, that's got more downsides than up.

Thinking it through, though, disabling links is a foolish goal. All it prevents is a direct click, when cut/paste or (horrors!) just typing the links will always work just fine. If there's an institutional block on clicking links, for good or bad reasons, it should be done at the reader level, not necessarily a doc-by-doc level.

It stills seems like among all those checkboxes controlling PDF characteristics, a flag to "don't enable links" would be trivial and not-unuseful. 🙂

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

But Acrobat will recognise them anyway? 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Point being to tell Acrobat not to. But for all the reasons explored, there's no particularly good reason to do this and it in no way blocks access to those links, just makes the user jump through one easy hoop.

That real, embedded hyperlinks can be negated (by not checking "include hyperlinks") is... useful, I guess.