[Macworld.com]

Learn how to embed active links in PDFs you create from Word documents, with a little help from Pages 2 [more]

[Nobody]

It would be nice if this was a system wide feature ie anything with a link embedded in it stayed a hot link in the subsequent pdf.
TextEdit could use this feature. As also could iText Express which I use because I can edit the links unlike in TextEdit.
I believe it all works as expected in Windows, so maybe Apple could start the photocopiers for Leopard!

[HandyMac]

Thanks for this hint, which will be a real help. I'd thought the inability to preserve links in PDFs was a lack in OS X's PDF maker, but apparently it's a matter of each application? I don't use Word, but do create a lot of docs (with links) in TextEdit that I'd like to make into PDFs, but thought I'd have to buy Acrobat to have this simple capability.
iText Express looks really good (sort of like WriteNow for OS X), though I haven't gotten into it yet; but you can edit links in TextEdit: select the link and evoke the contextual menu (with the ctrl key). Of course, you can't select the link by clicking on it, but you can use the shiftarrow keys, or cmdshift+arrow if the link is a line by itself. I discovered back in 10.3 that text from Safari pasted into TextEdit would retain links, but there was no way to create or edit them, so I figured out how to create them in a simple html editor and copy them into TextEdit. And was pleased to see link creation and editing added to TextEdit in 10.4.
Unfortunately, Pages has one glaring omission, a feature that's been standard in every (other) word processor since ca. 1990, whose lack makes Pages useless for anything beyond the simplest projects: the ability to set line spacing (leading) in a paragraph regardless of the mixture of fonts/scripts therein. MacWrite II had it, Pages doesn't. If you mix fonts with different native line spacing in Pages, there's no way to avoid a resulting mess. Maybe Pages 3 (4?) will finally have this essential basic feature?

[plustwo]

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Thanks for this hint, which will be a real help. I'd thought the inability to preserve links in PDFs was a lack in OS X's PDF maker, but apparently it's a matter of each application? I don't use Word, but do create a lot of docs (with links) in TextEdit that I'd like to make into PDFs, but thought I'd have to buy Acrobat to have this simple capability.

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Yes, thanks indeed! I've hunted high and low for a way to created PDFs of my Word documents that retain all of the links - both internal "cross references" as well as true embedded (http://) hyperlinks. Mostly all I've found is what doesn't work ... in particular, do NOT go looking for the official Adobe Acrobat to solve this problem on a Mac! In spite of (a) what their documentation says, (b) what their support staff believes, and © how Adobe Acrobat plug-in for MS Word works on Windows (where it will create PDFs with embedded links), the Mac version of Adobe Acrobat does NOT do this!!!! I got Adobe to refund my purchase when I finally convinced their tech support that this capability is completely missing from their Mac version, and couldn't possibly be there because the Mac version does not have any kind of actual plug-in module for MS Word, the way the Windows version does--and that plug-in module is the magic piece that allows them to create PDF from directly inside Word, where it has the actual link details accessible. (Those details are what do not get passed across the printer interface, and thus get lost when "printing" into a PDF-generating driver.)
I'd love to try this new tip out, using Pages 2, but just discovered that all I have is Pages 1 ... so maybe I'll wait for the next rev of iWork in January. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

[Toe_MW]

Normally this column is pretty helpful, but this article was a bit of a sham. Buy another word processor to fix a shortcoming in a (very expensive) word processor? Doesn't that seem a bit odd?
I'll agree that Pages is far preferable to Word. However, in an office environment, Pages is still not a practical solution. It does not seamlessly open and save Word documents (at best, it imports and exports them fairly well). It is therefore useless as a substitute for Word in an office that deals with the outside world a lot. So purchasing it for just this one capability is a bit of a stretch.
More realistic solutions for this problem are:
- Buy Acrobat Pro (which admittedly also sucks and costs a fortune)
- Wait (forever) for Office 2007, which will suck in much different ways than the current one
- Wait for iWork 3, which hopefully will give native .doc support to Pages, then get rid of Word
- Evaluate the many, many other word processors out there.

[mactex]

Re: Purchasing Adobe Acrobat Pro as a solution to this problem - Save your money.
I just began helping edit a monthly newsletter for a local college. It's created in Word and "printed to PDF" to distribute. In an effort to make the newsletter more useful I suggested we start including links to items in some of the articles. Since this wasn't possible using our previous method of conversion I decided to try Acrobat Pro for Macintosh as a solution. After trying various methods without success I went searching on the web to see what I was doing wrong. I found out as "plustwo" did above, Adobe's product, Pro or otherwise, does NOT have this capability on the Macintosh. (From reading different comments on the web I surmise that it's not completely successful on PCs either.
I was very happy to see that Pages 2 does provide this capability and we're looking into this option now.

[griffman]

"A sham?"
So this hint is "a trick that deludes" or "cheap falseness" or is it "an imitation or counterfeit purporting to be genuine" ... or perhaps you just meant to call it "an ornamental covering for a pillow." Sorry, but this hint is none of the above. This tip explains how to use one program (Pages) to solve that caused by another (Word). That doesn't make it a sham, nor does it make it a worthless tip. There are many people who own both iWork and Word -- especially since iWork is an amazing bargain at $79.
Let's look at your alternatives...
"Buy Acrobat Pro (which admittedly also sucks and costs a fortune)"
As others in this thread have noted, that won't solve the problem, as it still won't create proper embedded links.
"Wait (forever) for Office 2007, which will suck in much different ways than the current one"
Yep, that'll help solve the problem now for those who need PDF printing of Word docs with links.
"Wait for iWork 3, which hopefully will give native .doc support to Pages, then get rid of Word"
Pages 2 comes very close to having native support for Word docs, and it can write in that format. Given that none of the competing open source Office clones have managed 100% Word compatibility, I doubt we'll see this in Pages 3. Again, waiting isn't an option for those who wish to create documents today.

"Evaluate the many, many other word processors out there."
Sure, none of which will offer 100% native Office compatibility, which many businesses require. Though I haven't tested every single Mac word processor, I'm not aware of anything other than Pages that will (a) open Word documents, and (b) properly embed any links in the resulting PDF.
So, with no good alternatives other than this tip, I think it's very useful for those who need this capability. Those who don't, of course, won't care one way or the other.
-rob.

[Nobody]

TextEdit can not edit any old text into a link. It has to be a link already or you do not get the link editor in the contextual menu.
iText Express was built on the open source code of TextEdit, so makes a neat replacement for Apple's version. It is not quite perfect but it has most of the features you could want whilst retaining the simplicity which I demand.
iText Express has become my default word processor. I even do elementary layouts in it for software manuals. If it had retrospectively editable styles, and retained links and multimedia when printed/converted to pdfs I'd be in heaven.

[HandyMac]

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TextEdit can not edit any old text into a link. It has to be a link already or you do not get the link editor in the contextual menu.

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Yes, it has to be a live link before you can get the link editor, but it's not hard to make a live link in TextEdit: Either (1) you can use Format:Text:Link to create a live link, or (2) any complete URL either typed or pasted into the text can be selected and made into a link using the contextual menu. Whereupon its visible text can be changed by typing the desired new text somewhere inside it, then deleting the residue with the delete key (and various modifiers).
For instance, make a live link of "http://www.macworld.com" using either of the methods above, then use the left arrow to locate the cursor at the beginning of the phrase, use the right arrow to move the cursor one character in (between the first h and the first t), type "Macworld", then use forward delete (fn-delete on a PowerBook keyboard) to delete the rest of the original phrase ("ttp://www.macworld.com"), use the left arrow to go back and delete the initial "h", and you have a live link that says "Macworld" with the embedded URL. Maybe not as elegant as some methods, but pretty good for a basic text editor.
And the reverse: if a link is dragged or pasted from Safari into TextEdit, it'll show the visible text (e.g. "Macworld") with the actual link ("http://www.macworld.com") embedded. If you want the actual link to show, you can use the contextual menu's "Edit Link" to copy it, then paste it onto the link instead of the previous visible text.

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iText Express has become my default word processor. I even do elementary layouts in it for software manuals. If it had retrospectively editable styles, and retained links and multimedia when printed/converted to pdfs I'd be in heaven.

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Agreed, iText Express looks good, with most of what TextEdit lacks to be an excellent basic WP, e.g. adjustable margins, headers & footers, page numbers. Like I said, WriteNow (which was my WP of choice on my Mac Plus) for OS X.

[saxmike]

I'm a little late to this discussion, but I just tried exporting a PDF from OpenOffice (version 2.0.3) and it created the links just fine. And I'm pretty sure that OpenOffice does a good job of importing word documents. Would that do the trick?
-Mike

[griffman]

Yes, it should -- though the last time I tried OpenOffice, it had some issues with more complex Word documents (the one I was testing with had some tables, reviewer's comments, and graphics). It's been a while since I tried it, though, so things may have improved since then.
-rob.

[saxmike]

Rob, thanks for the note.
I hadn't tried OpenOffice for a while either, but decided to give it another go. My very quick initial review (based on maybe an hour of playing with it):
-It's now Universal Binary which is great, except that since it runs in X11, it still doesn't feel quick and snappy, even on my Mac Pro with 2GB RAM
-It now includes a database component that looks and feels like MS Access, but it crashed an awful lot as I was trying to create some queries. But before it crashed I was VERY excited to see it work at all; I see that as a good sign of another database platform
-The PDF export feature works very nicely. It did export web links correctly.
-I was able to open and save Word and Excel documents effectively, which I subsequently opened in WinXP and looked great, although the documents I was working with were relatively simple ones.
Basically, I think it's so CLOSE to being a serious competetor to MS without QUITE being there. I can use it for home documents, but I'm just not quite ready yet to tell my boss that we can start using it in place of MS Office. Of course, I felt the same way about it 6 months ago too, so maybe it'll never get there...

[HandyMac]

Don't know if anyone's likely to read this at this late date (?), but thought I'd mention that the excellent Aqua port (i.e. doesn't require X11, looks and acts like a Mac app) of OOo, NeoOffice, also preserves URLs when exporting to PDF. It's a little sluggish, particularly while starting up (due to the use of Java?), on PPC Macs, but runs quite well on my new MacBook Pro (and presumably other Intel Macs).