Possible bug: hyperlinks breaking in endnotes

[psheld]

I created the endnotes in Publisher v1 manually. It was a real pain as you can imagine. So thank goodness v2 has the Notes capability. I have found a bug however. When the note includes a URL that spans lines, the hyperlink is truncated to the first line. See screenshot.

I've titled this topic "Possible bug" because it could be something I'm doing wrong of course.

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, psheld said:

I created the endnotes in Publisher v1 manually. It was a real pain as you can imagine. So thank goodness v2 has the Notes capability. I have found a bug however. When the note includes a URL that spans lines, the hyperlink is truncated to the first line. See screenshot.

I've titled this topic "Possible bug" because it could be something I'm doing wrong of course.

This isn't an Affinity bug, this is Apple Preview being super unhelpful in trying to detect hyperlinks. It will happen to any PDF including ones generated by Apple's own apps such as Pages. Just ignore it and if you want to test the link click on the second line, not the first. Or use a different PDF viewer.

[psheld]

Thanks @MikeTO.

I have now opened the same PDF in Firefox and Chrome. None of the links are clickable in Firefox. The same thing happens in Chrome as happens in Mac Preview.

[psheld]

Actually, it appears results vary for Chrome. It looks as if links that span multiple lines and break at a forward slash, a question mark, or underscore are malformed, i.e. Chrome thinks the hyperlink is described only by the first line. If the line breaks at a hyphen, the link works as expected.

The links are entirely dead in Firefox though as reported. Let me try Safari. Perhaps unsurprising, Safari suffers the same odd behaviour as Mac Preview.
 

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, psheld said:

Thanks @MikeTO.

I have now opened the same PDF in Firefox and Chrome. None of the links are clickable in Firefox. The same thing happens in Chrome as happens in Mac Preview.

If none of the links are clickable in another PDF viewer, are you sure you clicked the Include Hyperlinks checkbox when exporting that time? It's very easy to miss.

6 hours ago, psheld said:

Actually, it appears results vary for Chrome. It looks as if links that span multiple lines and break at a forward slash, a question mark, or underscore are malformed, i.e. Chrome thinks the hyperlink is described only by the first line. If the line breaks at a hyphen, the link works as expected.

I can't duplicate any issues. Here are PDFs exported from Affinity and Apple Pages using the URL of this thread. Both are valid PDFs with links spanning multiple lines. Preview does it thing to both of them, mucking up the first line, but clicking on any line other than the first will work. Both work fine in Chrome and in Acrobat.

affinity.pdfpages.pdf

[psheld]

Thanks @miketo for investing the time to help me here. The morsel I needed from your last comment is:

Quote

are you sure you clicked the Include Hyperlinks checkbox when exporting that time? It's very easy to miss.

It is indeed very easy to miss to the point I didn't even know about it! When I tick it, everything works a treat, even in Preview. Thank you 🙏🏼

I guess Firefox wasn't rendering any links because there weren't any. And the behaviour I saw in Chrome must have been its partial success in interpreting some strings as URLs and making them hyperlinks accordingly; at least that's my guess.

I haven't done as much thinking about the use cases of Publisher as those who design it, obviously! But I'm intrigued. When would someone wish to export a document that has hyperlinks so that the PDF renders the string of the URL but does not render them clickable?!

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, psheld said:

I haven't done as much thinking about the use cases of Publisher as those who design it, obviously! But I'm intrigued. When would someone wish to export a document that has hyperlinks so that the PDF renders the string of the URL but does not render them clickable?!

It makes no sense to have clickable links in a printed document. So that setting defaults to off when you're exporting a PDF using the For Print preset, for example.

[psheld]

Really? If I export a PDF that has clickable links, then the very process of printing makes them unclickable on paper! I don't need to turn them off for export. Do I?!

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, psheld said:

Really? If I export a PDF that has clickable links, then the very process of printing makes them unclickable on paper! I don't need to turn them off for export. Do I?!

You don't need to, but as they are meaningless the option is automatically disabled.

[psheld]

And so, with due respect, I still don't know of a use case requiring the export of URLs that aren't clickable. And if there is such a use case, perhaps it would still be preferable to have a corresponding checkbox default to enabled rather than disabled.

Ah hang on. Just thought of something. Does this box change the formatting of the links on export? Perhaps omitting an underline if one is otherwise used in the Publisher doc for hyperlinks?

[Old Bruce]

2 minutes ago, psheld said:

I still don't know of a use case requiring the export of URLs that aren't clickable.

May be smaller file sizes. Or just legacy, I think there was no clickable URL in the original PDFs.

[MikeTO]

10 minutes ago, psheld said:

Ah hang on. Just thought of something. Does this box change the formatting of the links on export? Perhaps omitting an underline if one is otherwise used in the Publisher doc for hyperlinks?

I believe turning off hyperlinks in InDesign changes their appearance but not in Publisher at this time. Perhaps someday.