Remove ghost link from PDF w/ preview?

Question

Level 1

5 points

Remove ghost link from PDF w/ preview?

I have PDFs in my library that for some reason preview has identified "links" in random locations. I want to remove these links since i) they open up a web browser page when you accidentally hit the generally hidden box, and i) the link doesn't take you anywhere since it is composed of a bunch of random characters. The links do not appear in the inspector under the pencil tab.

I'm not sure if I can attach the PDF without violating copyright of the journal. Here is a picture.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.5

Posted on Oct 18, 2022 11:36 AM

Reply

Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

85,366 points

Oct 18, 2022 11:49 AM in response to BoringWyatt

The problem has to do with the optical character recognition functionality of whomever created the PDF. You can attempt to open with Adobe Acrobat Pro to clearly remove links, but links within PDFs are embedded from the PDF's actual author, and may not be edited otherwise without a true professional PDF editor. Wondershare PDF editor may have this functionality as well. A few online PDF editor websites exist, but I'm not aware of any that will recognize all links embedded in the PDF.

Reply

Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

124,472 points

Oct 18, 2022 1:11 PM in response to BoringWyatt

Open the PDF with link annotations in Preview. Press cmd+i to open the Inspector, and then click the pencil icon to see the annotations. Select each link annotation that you want ot remove and backspace to delete it. When done, save the PDF.

If the PDF is password protected against changes, then the preceding will deny you when attempting to remove link annotations.

Reply

Remove ghost link from PDF w/ preview?

Similar questions