In SL, I could give Print from Safari and instead of clicking PDF > Save as PDF, if I click Preview and save the document from within Preview, I could retain the hyperlinks. But this no longer works in Lion. Anyone has a solution?
Mac OS X (10.7)
Finally some really good news. Mark Rowe picked this up and it got fixed in the current nighly build of Safari.
For those who can not wait until the next regular Safari update here is the link:
Cheers,
Karsten
I'm in the same boat like you... An it is Safary, that broke it, not Lion.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3204750?answerId=16027859022#16027859022
I traced things down to a Safari bug introduced April 6th.
Nightly build 83010 works, 83080 does not.
I filed a bug report which is still dormand:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65076
The problem: nobody picked up that bug for about 2 months.
So don't expect a solution soon. Perhaps we should start to be
a bit more vocal at the Safari team ...
A small update to links missing when saving as a PDF.
I was looking over the Apple Support document HT2506 (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2506?viewlocale=en_US#PDF), Mac 101: Preview. It mentions that the Annotate feature will allow links to be embedded in a PDF. While not being very elegant, it works.
But now, here is the insteresting find:
I saved the support page as a PDF so that I could review it later. When I opened the PDF later to read though the document, I was fidgeting with the trackpad and noticed that the http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2506?viewlocale=en_US#PDF
link at the bottom of each page is hot! The link to the support article works, but none of the other links in the document.
The results were the same whether I saved it out in the Reader format or the standard "Save as PDF."
This has to be a missing feature in Lion. We have duplicated the problem with several users and multiple Macs. Updating the print drivers did not solve the problem.
Let's hope Apple fixes this in 10.7.X
I +1 this. It's incredibly annoying. I use it to print off receipts that I can then link to in URLs so this is a major downgrade for me as it disrupts my workflow. I would really appreciate Apple fixing this.
This is killing me too. As a researcher who likes to print web docs as PDF's to highlight and annotate, to do so I now have to be without the links. This is a MAJOR step backwards and I hope it is just a bug and not one of the new Apple's notorious new ways to dumb everything down.
PS For me this started the day I upgraded to 10.7
Have tried all browser variations, using the Adobe Acrobat to make the PDF, none of it works.
And no, 10.7.1 does nothing
I'm in the same boat as the rest of you and can no longer retain the links in my pdf documents...I contacted support and was told that this feature is no longer supported in Lion. I tried to find another program like PDF pen that supports this feature, but presently they say this is not working in their program either in Lion. A primitive work around is to save the webpage...I used to love this feature. If this was done for security, IMO you can carry security to the point where you don't have a complex OS anymore,...just a MBP that's heavier more expensive version of an Ipad. I'm annoyed that this feature was dropped. With every passing day, I'm thinking of going back to SL...and staying there.
mc.david wrote:
In SL, I could give Print from Safari and instead of clicking PDF > Save as PDF, if I click Preview and save the document from within Preview, I could retain the hyperlinks. But this no longer works in Lion. Anyone has a solution?
It seems that Firefox did not retain those links before.
I tried Firefox on a 10.6.8 Mac with Safari 5.0 installed (which still retains the links) and the links were gone. So either Firefox did not keep the links at all or there is some other issue with Firefox.
The feature to retain links in Safari-generated PDFs actually was lost in Snow Leopard, I believe with the 10.6.8 update.
That, along with Safari no longer willing and able to "Always Block Cookies" has made Safari my 3rd-choice browser, after Chrome and then Firefox.
I have this problem, except I am usually using Firefox (9.*, 10.2, 11) after I switched to OS X (10.7.2 and 10.7.3). Will have to forward a support question to the Mozilla team and see how they can fix this, it seems Firefox browser has the same trouble.
When choosing (from Safari 5.1.3 or Firefox 9*, 10*, 1nd 11.0) either
File -> Print -> PDF -> Open PDF in Preview, or
File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF
The resulting file contains "highlighted" or blue text where the original web page contained links. However links WITHIN the document, or to external URLs, and DEAD. broken. Click it nothing happens.
What am I missing?
Per this thread I tried an upgrade to safari 5.1.4. Voila, PDF files have links. Interestingly, the resulting links in the PDF are NEITHER highlighted, blue color, or in any way distinguishable by eye. For instance, print-as-PDF any Wikipedia article. If the article used italics to distinguish a link, you will see italics in the PDF. But no color clue if the text is in normal font. The only clue to a link's existence is if you hover over a link-word with the cursor, the link appears. ARGH! Why can't the PDF display the tet as it appeared in the browser, i.e. with a color highlight!
Hi rj,
The stand alone WebKit version within Safari got fixed with the latest release, but not the system wide WebKit, which is open to developers using Mac OS X system calls. So apps like NetNewsWire, Vienna, RapidWeaver etc, which depend on the system WebKit, will keep this bug until a future Mac OS X update.
The good news: it is fixed, the bad news: we have to wait until the fix makes it into a Mac OS X release...
Cheers,
Karsten
On further thought, I'd call the fix a good start, but it seems to have introduced a new wrinkle. Here's what I mean.
The fix to WebKit means Safari 5.1.4 does now produce a PDF file with "active links." But the link text appearing in a PDF has lost something that appeared in the original's browser window: links that appeared as blue (or other color, but I refer to the default style) in the browser are rendered in the PDF with no distictive formatting at all. If the tag text was italicized in the source document and browser window, it appears in the PDF as just italicized, in preview, now. Of course, italics are used frequently just for emphasis in prose, not to indicate links.
I'd ask the reader to consider the effect of this re-rendering. The very purpose and nature of hyperlinks is to provide a visual clue: you see a distinct color formatting on a term, if you click on it you will go somewhere to learn more. By stripping out the visual link distinction from the PDF rendering, the only visual clue is if the word is other-wise formatted in the original (i.e. older content is broken). Looking at some random Wikipedia content (a fairly lage body with uniform style / policy), all link-terms appear with the color difference (and the color changes once you've followed the link), some will appear as regular text and some is italicized.
I applaud getting WebKit out the door and I look forward to some sort of fix being introduced. The PDF rendering fix seems to "dumb down" the visual link language once it is exported to a PDF; here this fix introduces (IMHO) a new serious defect. It strips out the visual language we have used to identify links since the beginning of HTML, or at least as far back as I can recall. If this is the visual interface the reader is left with from here forward, the only way to skim a PDF for actual links would be to mouse over every word of text to "discover" where the links are (that's sure not how I learned to read docs rendered from HTML!). Something significant has been lost.
(This is a follow-on post, second try, because the website went zonkers on me when I tried to update the first time.)
I'm having this issue with saving a MS Word 2011 doc. Hyperlinks are NOT preserved. Seems unrelated to any browser version. I'm on OSX 10.7.4. Have tried the 'built-in' "Save as PDF" option under the PRINT GUI, also tried the "Save as Adobe PDF", as I have Acrobat 10 installed as well. Appreciate any tips.
I am having this problem just as you describe from a Word 2008 doc. I opened the .pdfs in Preview and there are no hyperlinks, then open it in Adobe Acrobat or Reader and the hyperlinks work! Must be a problem with Preview. I just upgraded to Lion thinking all the bugs have been worked out... not this one!
Well, this whole thing is related to Safari and WebKit only.
It has nothing to do with MS Office, which does not use WebKit.
This bug is solved and discussion should be closed.
Please open a separate thread to get help for your issues.
How can I retain hyperlinks while saving a webpage as PDF via Print?
