Links not working in PDF?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hello.

I’m evaluating Scrivener and I’m quite impressed so far. The only issue I’m having at this time is with Links and Compilation to PDF. Links seems to be working for HTML export, both in document and in the TOC, but when I export to PDF they vanaish.
Are links supported for PDF output?

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi,

Which sort of links do you mean? Links to web pages should work fine, but as you mention the ToC, I assume you mean internal links - unfortunately those aren’t supported in PDF export at all, no. PDFs are just generated by passing the pages to the OS X print services which can generate a PDF file from them; there is no way to tell the PDF file to insert links to specific locations from a technical point of view, though (obviously the PDF format in general supports this sort of thing, but there’s no way for me to tell OS X’s PDF-generation to add them).

Thanks for trying Scrivener!

All the best,
Keith

3

Hi Keith.
Yes, I was using links inside the document. Is there any way to make this happen using some postprocessing? Maybe going through TeX? This feature is really key for my work and I would love to use Scrivener, it really fits my workflow so any way of working around the limitation, even if it involves writing code for it, would be great.

Thanks.

4

Unfortunately I can’t think of any good way around it, sorry, not even with post-processing. The trouble is, once the file is converted to PDF, the information about the links is gone, so there’s nothing to post-process. And if there is no way for the OS X PDF creation code to take, say, hyperlinks and turn those into internal PDF links, then there’s nothing Scrivener can do to help matters, either. I have looked and looked but the Apple PDF generator doesn’t seem to have any way of supporting internal links, which probably makes sense because it is derived from the printing engine.

All the best,
Keith

5

Hi Keith.

I’m sorry, I didn’t explain myself clearly. I was thinking that maybe there is a way of saving to an intermediate format that preserves the links and then convert to PDF from there. For example, Open Office or Pages are capable of generating PDFs with links.

Thanks.

6

I’ve heard legends of LaTex output via Multi-Markdown, which is an output option in Scrivener. There are even various options that convert Scrivener links to MMD links if I recall correctly. Maybe that’s a good line of investigation for getting a linkified PDF out of Scrivener.