[Tex/LaTex] Using url package without hyperref makes link hit boxes erratic

urls

I've currently got a url link in a footnote in my document. With the hyperref package, everything works correctly. Because the IEEE PDF Express tool doesn't like having the hyperref package, I've removed it and only left in the url package.

However, some strange behavior occurs as a result of this. Instead of just the link being clickable, entire paragraphs of text before/after end up being clickable and going to the same link. This occurs for both Skim and Preview in Mac OSX.

Does anyone have an inkling of what might be causing this?

Best Answer

Without hyperref no hyperlink is created by LaTeX; however, PDF previewers on Mac OS X have heuristics that try finding URL's (or, more generally, URI's) in the PDF files.

Such heuristics often try being too smart and fail. :-(

So it's not a LaTeX problem, but of the Apple library PDF viewers are based on (Preview, Skim and others). Since Adobe Reader is not based on that Apple library, the link are indeed not recognized.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to avoid link higlighting when using package hyperref

Only load the url package it also provides \url but will not render an hyperlink. Note that most PDF viewer do this now automatically anyway.

If your really need hyperref for something else try to:

Load the option with the package: \usepackage[colorlinks=false]{hyperref}
Create a hyperref.cfg file in the same directory as your TeX file and put the \hypersetup{colorlinks=false} in there.

Certain options of hyperref must be given very early and can't be changed afterwards. The colorlinks option might be one of them.

Supplement:

I just tested this under my TeXLive 2010 installation. With colorlinks=false I get the usual colored frame around the hypertext. You might want to activate colors and set them to black:

\usepackage[colorlinks=true,urlcolor=black]{hyperref}

[Tex/LaTex] How to emulate \url hyphenating without using the url package

Without any package, your only hope is that they use a fairly recent TeX distribution:

\newcommand{\url}[1]{%
  \begingroup
  \ttfamily
  \begingroup\lccode`~=`/\lowercase{\endgroup\def~}{/\discretionary{}{}{}}%
  \begingroup\lccode`~=`.\lowercase{\endgroup\def~}{.\discretionary{}{}{}}%
  \catcode`/=\active\catcode`.=\active
  \scantokens{#1\noexpand}%
  \endgroup
}

This will allow breaks after periods and slashes.

If you have some special character in your URLs, they can be taken care of, just present some examples.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to avoid link higlighting when using package hyperref

[Tex/LaTex] How to emulate \url hyphenating without using the url package

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