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How to (totally) disable hyperlinks in a PDF?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 22, 2022
13 replies
16341 views

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.

Import and export

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer BobLevine

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

T

T@ny@nyu

Participant

If you export the PDF as a JPEG, and then convert the jpeg file(s) back to a PDF, it should disable the hyperlinks, even in a browser.

BobLevine

Community Expert

That is a horrific idea and will turn the entire thing into nothing but a picture. I'm locking this discussion as it's been asked and answered.

D

Danielle383890353ilv

Participant

Flatten the pdf. File - Print - Microsoft Print to PDF - Print. Save your file.

As for why someone would remove remove hyperlinks and such, here's an example. The NIH does not allow them on documents uploaded as part of grant proposal. Yes, it's silly and annoying that this is the case, but you have to format your documents they way they want them if you want to submit your grant application. And sometimes, like in a bibliography, the URL is the only thing to reference, so you can't just totally remove it, but they won't let it be clickable.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

All understood - technical and regulatory issues included - but it's worth noting that a fully flattened PDF is an image of a document's pages, no longer live text that can be searched, read by accessibility tools or otherwise used by anything but eyeballs... and is often orders of magnitude bulkier.

The PDF non-standard really needs a doc level toggle for things like "do not parse links." Instead we have stone-age workarounds.

T

Tina38163619sjtw

Participant

Correct. And, while docs w/hyperlinks are banned, they must remain searchable. I beloieve there is an option under "Edit" to remove hyperlinks but when I run it, it tells me it finds none; yet, there they are! Also, one of the exhibits was old and the text was searchable, but not editable but the links still worked so I actually had to edit with Microsoft Paint and erase the periods that connected the link. I was running out of time.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

Converting to curves should disable them permanently...

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

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

Legend

But Acrobat will recognise them anyway?

V

Viviana27026770s4s2

Participant

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

Legend

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.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

To repeat Bob Levine's question...

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

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

T

Tina38163619sjtw

Participant

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

Legend

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.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

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 )

TextHyperlinkNotDetectable-SpecialCharactersIncluded.pdf

BobLevine

Community Expert

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.

Jumpenjax

Community Expert

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.

Lee- Graphic Designer, Print Specialist, Photographer

BobLevine

Community Expert

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

L

Laubender

Community Expert

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 )

TextHyperlinkDetectable.pdf

TextHyperlinkNotDetectable.pdf

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

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.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

L

Laubender

Community Expert

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 )

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

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

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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