How to create live links both manually and automatically.

You can enhance the users experience of your pages by adding interactivity. You can create links very easily using Adobe Acrobat Pro, and you can automatically convert your web and email links in your document into live app links. If you need to optimise your PDF, please do so before adding interactivity. Click the How to Optimise Your PDF link in the support tab for more information.

Creating links manually using Acrobat Pro.

The automatic tool to convert email and web addresses into live links will only work with text. Where you have images, graphics and non text based content you can add the links manually in a few seconds following these steps:

i. Links are added using the ‘Link’ tool under the ‘Tools’ > ‘ Content’ > ‘Add or Edit Interactive Object’ button:

ii. Once you click on the ‘Link’ button, select the area of your PDF you wish to make interactive.

iii. Then click on the ‘Open a web page’ radio button as below
(note: open a web page is selected for all interactivity including email and video) 

iv. To add a web link, type the domain but you must include http://www or links may cause your app to crash. As below.

v. To add an active email link, type the email address after ‘mailto:’ and then after the email address you must include a subject. You do this by adding ?Subject= plus the name of your subject, after the email address. See example below.

change ‘http’ to embed  as per the example below.

Creating links automatically using Acrobat Pro.

Acrobat Pro contains a tool to automatically convert email and web site addresses into active links. It is best to add links as part of the final process and  after optimisation, as the optimisation process can remove the links.

i. Open your PDF in Acrobat Pro and check to see if the ‘Create Links from URLs’ tool is displayed in your tools pallet. It looks like this:

ii. If the tool is not visible, you can add it by clicking the ‘Customize Quick Tool’ button that looks like this:

iii. You will then need to double click the ‘Create Links from URLs’ option from the left menu, to add it to your tools as per the screenshot below:

iv. Once the tool is available, simply click it to automatically convert addresses into live links, then save your PDF.

Important Note

This will only create links from areas that are text, where you have links that are part of an image you will have to create the links manually as described above.