Non-Actionable URLs in PDF generated through PD4ML

#27121

Hi Folks,

We have a requirement wherein, we need to display some hyperlinks within a PDF generated from PD4ML as non-actionable. By non-actionable I mean just pure plain text. It should not have an underline as urls have and it should not show up as a URL on hovering the mouse on top of it. It should be as plain text.

The urls are present within a tag and there is no anchor tags, however the PDF what we view from the Adobe PDF Reader still treats these plain text as hyperlinks. Now we are aware that this is a feature of the reader app to treat a qualified url string as a hyperlink. But as per our requirement we want to somehow override this feature from within the PD4ML so that they are not treated as such.

I am also aware that we can turn off this feature from the Preferences in Adobe Reader, however that will turn off all the URLs. We need to only disable it in some sections of the PDF.

Is there a way to embed some code within the PDF using PD4ML so that the reader does not treat a specific url as hyperlink within a PDF?

Thank You In Advance!!

#29984

pd4ml.disableHyperlinks() should do the trick.

#29985

@PD4ML wrote:

pd4ml.disableHyperlinks() should do the trick.

pd4ml.disableHyperlinks() is already used in the application, but still the same behavior in the Reader. Adobe Reader still treats them as hyperlinks.

#29986

OK, now I see your point. The issue is know (i.e. post3894.html#p3894 ) and we tried to find a workaround multiple times.

As far as I remember the last promising idea was to overlay entire page with a transparent image (or annotation area, or anything else to screen hyperlinks). I’ll try to find the investigation results and share with you.

#29987

Unfortunately it still can “see” the hyperlinks even “through” an overlaying image.

We did not test an approach to place a transparent object (a vector rectangle) over the hyperlink and to assign a dummy PDF script handler to it. But I think it would result other visual flaws.

So the only existent workaround is to damage a hyperlink representation: i.e. to pre-process HTML and to insert a space character after “http://”.

#29988

@PD4ML wrote:

Unfortunately it still can “see” the hyperlinks even “through” an overlaying image.

We did not test an approach to place a transparent object (a vector rectangle) over the hyperlink and to assign a dummy PDF script handler to it. But I think it would result other visual flaws.

So the only existent workaround is to damage a hyperlink representation: i.e. to pre-process HTML and to insert a space character after “http://”.

Thank you and yeah, I was aware of this workaround however just wanted to know if there was anything else that we can do apart from this from PD4ML end to get around this problem. Also, even if you break the url to http:// and a space and then the trailing part of the URL, the http:// part will still show up as a hyperlink. The only other way to resolve this is to remove http:// completely and adding a www and a space for ex: “www google.com” or simply “google.com”

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