Thanh Han The wrote:

there was a patch to copy links in embedded pdf's, but it was not integrated to pdf. The patch was not that simple and none of pdftex maintainers (including me) was willing to take care of it.

I think a compromise would be allowing certain kind of annotation to be copied, for example URI. But I cannot make any promise, sorry.

I'm not aware of programs that can merge pdf with annots; the problem is that there can be name clashes, tricky dependencies, additional resources etc. Annots have their own layer/space in the pdf file and merging involves parsing. If only annots were implemented/designed in pdf in a better way ... link annots are probably doable (if one is willing to sacrifice names, i.e. when pdftex may change the names of named destinations (which makes them unreachable from outside); widgets is another more complex area esp since macro packages need to manage resources (limiting functionality is a solution but the nice things of pdftex is its flexibility). In that case there would be a nee to more \pdf primitives (in order to deal with mergable resources, like the fields and javascripts stuff). Occasionally I need to do this kind of merge and then i use dedicates scripts. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------