A customer sent a PDF which we will use as virtual stationary. In the supplied PDF there are text with custom hyperlinks to online forms. When printing to PDF these hyperlinks are removed. (even when using passthrough mode) I know I can just strip the PDF of those hyperlinked text and recreate them in designer, but just wondered if there was a way to retain the hyperlinked text when processing the statements. A large portion of these statements end up as email attachments which is sent outside of Planet Press Connect.
I am using Virtual Stationary that I call dynamically. They have hyperlinks predefined in the original PDF and they still work once it went through Connect. In the output preset, I have the Pass-through PDF resources checked.
You say that they end-up as email attachments. Are those email sent by Connect? If so, maybe the “passthrough” doesn’t occurs when the PDF is produce directly from the same Temaplte as the email.
Have you tried simply printing into a PDF and test the link from it using a proper Output preset with PDF passthrough?
The output of this template gets emailed outside of Connect. So this is a normal Print Template. I have already tried passthrough via “print - advanced” and also via a “Print Virtual Stationary - Passthrough” output preset I have. I have also tried picking up the PDF via disk, just for science.
Keep in mind that text that looks like a web address (www.companyname.co.za) or email address (info@companyname.co.za) in a PDF will still work, it is just text like “FILL IN FORM” that loses its custom hyperlink.
AI have another one that I had to rebuild in Connect exactly becasue the text of it wasn’t “web or email” like.
Sorry for my previous answer,just sipping in my coffee. It hasn’t worked yet.
I even opened a ticket internally for that and here is the answer:
The hyperlinks are not supported on the input files (background, virtual stationery, etc.). At the moment only the output engine is able to preserve the hyperlinks, but in this case the hyperlinks get removed in the merge engine. The “working” links seem to be kind of autodetection in the PDF viewers, but the final output does not contain any link annotation. (The “working” links are not “real” PDF links even in the input — you can distinct between them by seeing “W” letter in the cursor when hovering over a “real” PDF link.)
Here is the ticket number for the improvement request it was turned into: SHARED-81112.
Ok, great. Was just wondering if I needed to recreate the hyperlinks in Connect. I prefer using supplied PDF’s as is to avoid errors. It can also be annoying when a client uses some obscure paid font that I sometimes battle to match. And we all know fonts matter to clients.
I used the following CSS to remove the underline from hyperlinks. (also note that color had to be done also using CSS since the UI options get ignored as mentioned below with underline options.) Connect 2021.1.1
@hamelj I tried the following to remove the underline from a hyperlink. Is this normal behavior? Because I know it was brought up years ago here. Connect ignores me if I disable underline from the toolbar. Same with selecting the text, right clicking and selecting Text from the context menu and unchecking Underline. It just reverts back to underline.
You are right about the color. After applying the exact step as specified by the referenced post, turns out that when you change the color, it is applied to a <span> for the displayed text and the color change will only show when previewed in web. I even tried putting the color code to the <a> but still, no luck once converted to a PDF.
As for the underline it does not get removed. My guess is that the html renderer adds it back realizing it is an url.
I will open an internal ticket for that and post back the answer/workaround/ticket number for further references.
TS-6456
