Unlink Links in PDF Output

[teknikulriter]

Hey Gang

Does anyone know how to "unlink" a live https link in the PDF output? Thanks in advance!

[teknikulriter]

OK! No responses, so I'll go ahead and open a ticket (again) with Flare. I seem to open a lot of tickets with them, since their help is kinda dismal.


Thanks.

[Nita Beck]

You can achieve this by creating a condition called something like “Unbind” and then creating a custom class of a in your stylesheet to use with the hrefs you want to “unlink”.

For the CSS, you’d have something like a.Unbind (I’m going on memory, so that might not be exactly valid) and associate that class with the “Unbind” condition and have the exclude condition be “unbind” rather than “remove.”

Next, apply that class to the hrefs you want to “unlink” in the PDF, to no longer have an underlying link. The text of the hrefs will still be present, but there will be no links.

Finally, in your PDF target, exclude the Unbind condition.

I know this’ll work, as I’ve done it myself. I’m just not in Flare right now and so can’t give you the exact bits, but I think I’m pretty close.

HTH

[KatherineMunro]

I'd love to have something simple: If the crossreference target is in the PDF, have an active link. If the target is not in the PDF, format as plain text.

This was out-of-the-box functionality with Author-It. (BTW, this is about the only thing I miss from Author-it...) It goes against the whole principle of single sourcing if I need to go through a topic and apply a condition to crossreferences before publishing for a particular PDF. The topic may be in many PDFs (plus CHM, plus HTML5), and any given crossreference may be relevant to one PDF but not another.

[doloremipsum]

Ok, I have an idea but it's a little off the beaten track... Maybe (maybe) you can use an attribute selector in your stylesheet to select for <a> tags which have a specific href format. See more about those here: https://learn.shayhowe.com/advanced-htm ... -selectors

There may not be a way to make this work - it depends on what format Flare uses to apply the cross references in the PDF. Maybe a look into the Temporary section of the output folder will help you identify what the links look like when they are A) linking to a file in the document, or B) linking to a file outside the document.