Hello pdf(tex) gurus,
I put together the whole-issue pdf for tugboat by running pdftex on the
tables of contents (i.e., the covers), and including all the interior
pages as a concatenated pdf. This is so I can provide a table of
contents with internal links to the article. That much works fine.
(Example: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-3/tb135complete.pdf.)
However, Thanh confirmed that all hyperlinks (and other annotations, but
hyperlinks are what matter to me) are stripped from the included pdf,
with no option to preserve. And indeed, there are no live links in the
interior of the tb*complete.pdf files.
I understand that the annotations are given in absolute coordinates, so
in general they wouldn't work after inclusion. But it seems to me that
in my case, they would still be accurate: including a whole-page (input)
pdf as a page in the output pdf, with no transformations. Then nothing
on the page has changed, so presumably the x,y coordinates on the
original page are still correct. (Or does the annotation also include the
PDF page number, which would indeed be different?)
I gather Ulrike wrote a program and LaTeX package newpax
(ctan.org/pkg/newpax) to replace the old pax, to solve this by saving
and re-inserting the annotation locations. I haven't tried it yet, but
in any case it would be painfully time-consuming to rewrite the plain
TeX setup for the TUGboat tables of contents in LaTeX, so I'm hoping I
don't have to.
I've tried pdftk, cpdf, ghostscript, and other tools to combine the
pdfs. Everything strips the links in the included pdf. Looking on
tex.sx, there are answers suggesting Adobe and other commercial
software, but a) I don't have any Adobe software and b) I don't want to
rely on it for TUGboat production.
So ... does anyone have any ideas of a method to get all links working?
Maybe LuaTeX can somehow preserve the annotations when including a pdf?
(I could get the TUGboat tocs working with plain luatex easily enough, I
imagine.)
Alternatively, and the real reason I'm writing to this list, maybe
someone would be up for looking into pdftex and seeing if there is a way
to (optionally) preserve annotations in an included pdf? So far my
forays into the source have not been successful, and Thanh won't be able
to look at it for some time.
Thanks,
Karl
