Controlling FrameMaker automatic link generation

[Fred Ridder]

The hyperlinks you are seeing in the PDF may not actually be there, and they probably did not come from FrameMaker! For several years, now, Acrobat has had the feature of inferring hyperlinks from text strings that look like URLs. But the feature is a little dumb in just the ways you describe (being unable to properly distinguish surrounding characters from the URL, and not working on URLs that are broken across more than one line).

The right way to handle URLs in FrameMaker is to explicitly code them as Hypertext markers of the Go To URL type. The marker contains the actual URL, which can be different from what appears in the text of the document, and the "hot-spot" area in the text is delimited by some character format that you apply to the desired string. (The character format does not need to look different than the regular text, but it must be applied or else FrameMaker will treat the entire portion of the paragraph that follows the Hypertext marker as the active area for the link.)

Then, when you create the PDF from the FrameMaker book, you need to ensure that the "Include Acrobat Data" option is selected so that the real URL from the marker will be passed into the PDF.  

It sounds more complicated than it is. The steps I use are:
Select the text that will be the hot-spot. If it's the correct string for the URL, copy it to the clipboard.Apply the character format you're using for hyperlinks.Go to the Hypertext window and choose "Go to URL" from the command list; "message URL" will appear in the text box.In the text box, paste (or type) the URL after the pre-populated string, then click Create Hypertext Marker.

-Fred Ridder


From: dharding at illinois.edu
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Controlling FrameMaker automatic link generation
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2015 19:37:57 +0000









Version: FrameMaker 12, Unstructured.
 
When generating PDFs, Frame automatically converts (SOME!) URLs to hyperlinks, which is great, but it’s not an exact science, and I’d like to be able to fine
 tune some things globally rather than manually inserting and editing a zillion hypertext links:
 
1.      
Frame recognizes
www.xxxxxxxx (without an http:// prefix) as a URL and converts it to a link. Fine. Spiffy. How do I get it to automatically recognize non-www domains, e.g. bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.? Where is this automatic conversion controlled?




2.      
Our formatting is such that we put urls in brackets, e.g., [www.fubar.com]. Problem: Frame automatically appends the closing bracket to the URL when
 creating the link, which of course breaks the link. Only the opening bracket, not the opening bracket. Adding a space, e.g., [
www.fubar.com ] does not fix the problem.




3.      
If I wanted to disable automatic link conversion in creation of the PDF (yet maintain conversion of manually created hypertext markers), where and
 how would I do this?




Thanks,
 
-Dan




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