Preserving links when exporting to PDFs from Pages 5.1

Several people have noted that links do not survive after the first page of a PDF document when exporting from a Pages 5.x document to PDF. *IF* the links are dislayed as html code, they will survive: e.g.


html://www.apple.com


will work on all pages of the PDF document (anyway, it works on page 2!)


But if you edit the link and CHANGE THE DISPLAY NAME, the links will no longer work on page 2 and subsequent pages. E.g., this link will NOT work even though it resolves to the same address (i.e., html://www.apple.com).


apple.com


This is insane, of course. Any work arounds?

Posted on Jan 26, 2014 6:33 AM

Reply
12 replies

Jan 26, 2014 8:56 AM in response to fruhulda

Try this:


-create a document in Pages 5.x;

-go to a web site in Safari, e.g., Amazon. Find your favorite book.

- drag the url into Pages. In Pages 4.3. (and TextEdit, Mail, etc) You would get the book title, author, etc. as hyperlinked text. In Pages 5, you get http://www.Amazon.com/etc,etc.

- If you edit that hyperlink so that it displays as (e.g.) My Favorite Book


it will not be "live" when you export to a pdf if it is not on the first page.

Jan 26, 2014 9:49 AM in response to fruhulda

Right, I know it will work if you don;t edit the display name. But one often will want to do that. If you were writing a column, say, you might say "In Dick Francis's novel Refusal, the author soes thus and such." That link is clickable. It would work natively in Pages 5, as in Pages 4.3, in a TextEdit document natively or exported to PDF, and in Apple mail, etc. It also works when you export from Pages 4.3 to PDF. In Pages 5, however, it only works (after the first page: who knows why it works on the first page!) if the display name is the same as the html code. This is a bug, or sloppy programming, or both.


I like Page 4.3 quite a lot. I has its limitations but it is simple without being simplistic. I had high hopes for Pages 5. Now that we have 5.1, though, I see that it is just not going to work for me or for my businesses. There are little things like the inability to set the default zoom (which is acutally quite annoying if your eyes are not so hot), the inabilty to see|print comments and big things like the lack of Applescript support, bookmarks, and mail merge. I thought Apple was going to be bringing back these features, but I see now that they are committed to the lowest common denominator. The people who say Apple is is the business of making "toys" are, alas, correct. I guess the business market is not big enough for them. I've actually removed pages 5.1 from all our our macs, and have removed 2.1 from our ios devices. We still have a few stray documents that were created or edited with Pages 5, but I've discovered that you can use Pages for icloud to download a pages file in Word format. Pages 4.3 can open and edit Word files, so that is a (cumbersome) workaround. We'll continue to use 4.3 (and 1.7.2 on the ipad) for the time being, but obviously will need to find something that has current support going forward.

Jan 27, 2014 5:21 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

Hi Peter,

Yes, hyperlinks are currently useful in pdf. But also have to disagree to some extent. Pdf's are usually formatted to mimic 8.5X11 paper or similar size in portrait orientation. Reading them on a computer screen, with some comfort, requires sufficient vertical size of the screen. Pdf looks fine on my 20" iMac, but not so great on my 13" Macbook. Of course, its vertical size is less than the 11" of paper. I can zoom in, but then need to scroll more. I often wished I could rotate the screen 90 degrees to better match the aspect ratio of paper.


On the other hand, I think epub can work better, than pdf, for screen viewing. It can also adapt better to various screen sizes and aspect ratios.


I predict we will eventually see pdf's, created and edited cross-platform, but outputted mostly to hardcopy, where links don't matter. The more device-flexible epub's will become more accepted for screen use.

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Preserving links when exporting to PDFs from Pages 5.1

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