Prevent Acrobat auto-generated Links
Acrobat Reader likes to auto-generate URLs and other links.
This is generally good for users, and they can turn it on or off.
However, there are times when distributing that clients don't want them. It is possible to change global settings, but it creates problems for bookmarks, internal links, and accessibility.
So, it would be great if there could be a feature to prevent the auto-generation of links in Acrobat, so only the ones that will exist are by design.
Cam
shared this idea
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Bevi Chagnon | PubCom.com
commented
Would love to see the option to turn off the auto-generated hyperlinks in the file itself, rather than in the Acrobat application (via user preferences).
These "fake" hyperlinks are not accessible and often create problems for assistive technologies and accessibility checking software.
Accessible hyperlinks are tagged:
<Link>
<Link-OBJR> -
David Farough commented
This issue has not occurred for me yet, but I can see how this would help me in the future.
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LauraR commented
Here's an example.
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My client needs some links to remain "cold", that is, text only. They should never be clickable or appear in mouse hover. The reason for this is the URL's frequently change and they don't want a PDF full of broken links.
While remediating a PDF, this has created a huge amount of unnecessary work for me trying to resolve this. The autogenerated "link" does not appear in Edit PDF>Links so it cannot be removed from the PDF.
In the meantime, my main client (a huge international corporation) switched to Foxit and it's awfully hard to convince them to return to Acrobat when there are issues like these.
A couple unusual things I noticed while reproducing this:
There is a DELAY when a PDF is first opened to when the behavior appears. It can be up to 30 seconds. So when you first open the PDF and mouse hover, the link appears to be cold. The cursor remains a cursor. However, after the delay, the cursor becomes a hand, the URL becomes clickable and a popup appears.
ALSO - sometimes the mouse hand only appears over the "http" or "www" part of the URL.
