Hyperlinks/anchors causing PDF export to fail

[Nathan Shirley]

I upgraded to 1.9 then tried to add hyperlinks to a very large project. After creating an index and then lots of hyperlinks, it fails to export to PDF (if hyperlinks are turned on in export settings). Since only one index is possible in AP, I manually created a second index, painstakingly making lots of anchors throughout the project, then creating hyperlinks one by one in the text of the index.

I think, but am not sure, that there's something strange going on with the hyperlink not exporting due to the nature of the hyperlinked text. But that's just a guess. For example, a single hyperlink might look something like this: Indexed Text 1____________________________p. 43

So maybe the underscored line messes up the hyperlinks??

I just updated to the latest AP version today, and the problem is still there. Before I was sure this was a bug I brought up the issue in the other forum, in case more info is needed (it includes a pdflib.log file which was recommended to create):

 

[walt.farrell]

You provided a PDFLib.log file in your other topic, and it showed the error was that one of your hyperlinks pointed to an object that was outside the page boundary. It didn't seem to be anything related to the _ characters.

You might try exporting using the latest release, and getting another log, and seeing what it says. If it says the same thing then we (or Serif) will probably need the .afpub file to perform any diagnosis.

[Nathan Shirley]

Oh outside the page boundary, interesting, thanks. So I do have quite a few objects that include blank space, where the visible parts are within the page boundaries, but a little of the blank corner or edge goes outside the page boundary. Some of the objects I've hyperlinked to are like this. Likely PDFs, SVGs, and/or grouped objects that have been cropped.

If that's the only problem here then it would be nice if Publisher could deal with that during export. If there were a way to have Publisher identify them all I could at least try to deal with them manually for the time being.

[Nathan Shirley]

Well I went through every anchor to visually inspect each in case any were outside the page boundaries. I found about 20 or so that were not outside the page boundaries, but touching them. I used vector crop to back a bit away from the boundaries. The export still failed. I do have a lot of PDFs and SVGs that go outside page boundaries, but have been vector cropped to stay inside, as I did for these last 20 or so.

I've attached the latest pdflib.log file.

pdflib.log

[walt.farrell]

Looks like the problem is with the link to whatever is on page 424.

[Nathan Shirley]

Thanks for looking at that--I'll check page 424.

However I made a test document and think the bug is actually pretty simple. It seems if an embedded PDF is set as an anchor with a hyperlink pointing to it, exporting to PDF will always fail. It doesn't actually seem to have anything to do with page boundaries. I've made 3 test documents that are attached:

1) Includes anchored PDFs that extend beyond page boundaries in various ways.

2) Includes anchored PDFs that don't exceed page boundaries.

3) Only includes plain anchored text, and this is the only file that exports successfully (when hyperlinks are included in the export obviously).

Anchor Test.afpub Anchor Test 2.afpub Anchor Test 3.afpub

[Gabe]

Hi both,

thanks for spotting this. Issue logged. 

[Nathan Shirley]

Quote

...if an embedded PDF is set as an anchor with a hyperlink pointing to it, exporting to PDF will always fail.

Any idea when this bug will be resolved?

[Nathan Shirley]

An update to this bug: hyperlinks pointing to both PDF and SVG files (and probably other embedded files) cause exporting PDFs to fail.

[Nathan Shirley]

This bug seems to only happen when hyperlinks point to PDFs and SVGs. JPGs and PNGs work fine.

Also, there's another smaller bug I found: sometimes when right clicking a hyperlink to remove that hyperlink (through the popup menu), part of the hyperlink will be deleted, but not all of it. Sometimes the middle of the hyperlink will be deleted, resulting in the two sides of the hyperlink splitting, creating two hyperlinks. This can be a little annoying to delete all the little bits.

See attached publisher file for an example with embedded SVGs, PDF, JPG, and PNG.

hyperlink bug test.afpub

[Dan C]

Just to confirm, I have updated the development log regarding Hyperlinks to Anchored SVG & PDF files, as mentioned here - 

On 3/26/2022 at 6:49 PM, Nathan Shirley said:

Also, there's another smaller bug I found: sometimes when right clicking a hyperlink to remove that hyperlink (through the popup menu), part of the hyperlink will be deleted, but not all of it. Sometimes the middle of the hyperlink will be deleted, resulting in the two sides of the hyperlink splitting, creating two hyperlinks. This can be a little annoying to delete all the little bits.

I'd recommend creating a separate thread for this report so that it is easier for our team to track such issues, many thanks in advance