[pdftex] pdf inclusion & hyperlinks

[Hans Hagen]

At 15:58 27/04/2003 +0700, The Thanh Han wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 11:07:28PM +0200, Andreas Matthias wrote:
> > Stefan Moebius wrote:
> >
> > > I'm using pdflatex with the pdfpages package to combine some articles
> > > into a journal. The articles contains some hyperlinks to the web as
> > > well as some internal refs (bib, equations, ...). The problem now is
> > > that the links no longer work in the completed journal (though they are
> > > still part of the pdf).
> > >
> > > I contacted Andreas Matthias and he told me to ask here. He also said
> > > that  he had heard from several people having the same problem.
> >
> > Since there is no response to this mail yet, I would like to try to
> > clarify things a bit. I did not have a look at the WEB sources, so
> > I hope I am not talking complete nonsense.
> >
> > When including a page of a PDF document with \pdfximage, pdftex
> > copies the /Contents of that page, but it does not copy the /Annots.
> > Of course there are a lot of annotations for which it does not make
> > much sense to copy them. But there are others for which it would be
> > really useful. Most notably annotations which are very frequently
> > used by pdftex users. I am thinking about /Link annotations with
> > /URI actions, like hyperlinks to web and email addresses.
> > (Concerning pdfpages.sty I get a lot of mails from people asking about
> > missing web and email hyperlinks.)
> >
> > How much effort would it make to let pdftex detect and copy /Link
> > annotations with /URI actions? If someone would be willing to
> > write a patch, would it be reasonable to handle just this case
> > or should other annotations (Widget, FreeText, ...) be considered
> > as well?
> >
> > Does someone like to write a patch? ;-)
>
>it wouldn't be a trivial patch at all. Not a weekend project.

indeed, it would involve dealing with duplicate destinations, name 
dictionaries etc and as a result it could lead to interference with 
existing code that handles such dictionaries; it would bring pdf parsing 
into pdftex on the one hand and more primitives on the other hand (to 
control access to related data structure) and it could have side effects; 
it would be a nice feature but it's definitely not a quick hack and it 
would also demands synchronization with macro development.

Hans
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