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

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Hi all,
I'm publishing music scores, where I assemble the final PDF file using latex 
with \includepdf.
This works really great, except that all hyperlinks in the included files are 
lost. The main problem here is that this also removes the links to the CC 
license of one score and the homepage of another author, which I'm required to 
keep for license issues...

Andreas Matthias told me that this would need to be fixed in pdftex rather than 
in includepdf. I've searched the archives and found some mails about this, but 
nothing definitive, only that this is on the issues list etc.

http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2006-May/006580.html
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-November/007426.html
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2006-August/006694.html

Also, since Andreas got the impression that you pdftex developers don't think 
this is a worthwhile feature (as he writes in 
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2006-May/006581.html), I'm also writing 
you that this is quite an important feature for me...


In particular, what happened to Andreas' patch:
http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-pdftex/2003-May/000163.html
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2006-June/006619.html
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2006-May/006576.html

The problem is that I'm writing the main file with latex, so I can't post-
process and join the pdf files afterwards using other tools, since then the 
table of contents will not be correct...

So, will hyperlinks from included PDFs ever be implemented? And what's the 
current status?

Cheers,
Reinhold
-- 
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Reinhold Kainhofer, reinhold at kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org