[pdftex] Preserving hyperlinks and annotations in included pdf files?

[Martin Schröder]

2009/10/29 Reinhold Kainhofer <reinhold at kainhofer.com>:
> So, will hyperlinks from included PDFs ever be implemented? And what's the
> current status?

It will not happen in pdftex, since pdftex is frozen.

It's unlikely that it will happen in luaTeX soon, since AFAIK the
concept of hyperlinks/annotations in PDF is broken, making including
them HARD:
- bookmarks & annotations are independent of the content stream and
  the page objects; they are in fact another layer on top of the
  "normal" content.
  This means that when including them they must be collected and
  transformed separately.
- the names of bookmarks & annotations pose a separate problem, since
  they must be merged, while checking collisons

Is there any software out that there that can include pages of PDFs
and handles bookmarks/annotations/...?

Best
   Martin