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

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 04:25:19PM +0100, Martin Schröder wrote:

> 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/...?

Of course,
  CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/pax/
  CTAN:install/macros/latex/contrib/pax.tds.zip

>From its README:

| A. PROJECT PAX
| ==============
| 
| If PDF files are included using pdfTeX, PDF annotations
| are stripped. This project tries a solution without
| altering pdfTeX. A Java program (pax.jar) parses the PDF file that
| will later be included. It writes the data of the annotations
| in a file that can be read by TeX. Then a LaTeX package (pax.sty)
| extends the graphics package. If a PDF file is included, the package
| looks for the file with the annotation data, reads them and puts
| the annotations in the right place.
| 
| Project status: experimental

For parsing the PDF file it currently uses the PDFBox library.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>
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