Keeping PDF Hylperlinks when exporting a PDF with multiple hyperlinked PDFs

[Austin5E88]

Hey!

I have built 4 separate elements and saved them all as PDFs with hyperlinks to different websites. They all work when I preview them in acrobat. I take those PDFs and put them on my master page layout in indesign and when I created a PDF of that master page layout I lose all of the hyperlinks that each of the individual PDFs had. Is this a normal thing or a setting that I am missing?

Not sure why each PDF still shows and has it's own hyperlink but when a PDF is put into another PDF it gets lost. This is how this process has to go, I am just at a loss for why they are being lost after the 2nd PDF export via the master page.

[Ian Sayers]

Yeah - this is how it unfortunately doesn't work. I have just tested this by placing an InDesign Document with buttons into another indesign document and exprted it as an Interactive PDF and the same problem - it doesn't see the buttons as interactive elements. Same for PDF into and Indesign Doc and then out to interactive PDF file.

Now the important part - if you have created these elements already in separate documents why do you need to have them as separate files ? you could make one document and copy and paste them into this new document... if it is due to making changes to one document and updating many places where it is used then i recommend Libraries.

[Austin5E88]

We build our ads in a program that generates the PDFs into another program so that we can flow them onto a page. We were hoping we could get an element in the original PDF that would stay when our second program places the PDF files on the page and creates a new PDF. I wanted to reach out here and make sure I wasn't missing a PDF preset or not using the correct type of PDF/hyperlink method.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

@Austin5E88 said: "when a PDF is put into another PDF it gets lost"

Yes, that is what happens. Essentially, InDesign treats the placed PDF as a graphic, not as an interactive PDF and all interactive items -- Buttons, Hyperlinks, Accessibility  -- are lost in the final exported PDF.

InDesign won't let us nest an interactive PDF into another interactive PDF and retain the interactivity of the original 1st (or source) PDF.

Vote to get this fixed! See https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/42680734-in...  and VOTE!

And tell your colleagues to vote for this feature. Since it's so hard to find items at UserVoice, my firm keeps a running list of topics at www.PubCom.com/vote