[XeTeX] hyperref??

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Jul 2004, at 9:01 pm, Jon Breitenbucher wrote:

> Well,
>
> I'm trying to process a document which has hyperlinks and I wanted to 
> use hyperref. I don't get any complaints when I process the file but 
> the links are not active and my color for the url is ignored(I am 
> using the color package). I'm guessing I could get color by using a 
> special? But what about active links? OR is hyperref totally out at 
> this point?

It's out, I'm afraid.

I assume hyperref writes some kind of \specials that the driver 
(dvipdfm or similar) recognizes. (Maybe it uses pdfTeX extensions if 
available, but they won't exist in XeTeX, so if it tried this you'd get 
errors.)

The xdv2pdf driver doesn't know anything about the hyperref specials, 
and so they're silently ignored. Support can't readily be added, 
because CoreGraphics (which xdv2pdf uses to generate the PDF output) 
doesn't provide APIs for creating links.

So this won't change until either (a) there's a major reimplementation 
of the back-end, generating the PDF directly rather than by imaging to 
a CoreGraphics context (this will mean quite a bit of extra work to 
fully support AAT fonts); or (b) Apple adds link-creation APIs to 
CoreGraphics.

Sorry.

Jonathan