How can I retain hyperlinks while saving a webpage as PDF via Print?

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

Thanks for the update.

I hope the webkit update is pushed out sooner rather than later.

I have opened a Mozilla community question here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/923776

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.