How to defeat automatic creation of "hot" email links?

They're not exporting as links from ID, they're being automatically recognized by Acrobat when the PDF is opened and activated on the fly (i.e. not stored in the PDF at all).

In Acrobat: Edit..preferences..general, general category - uncheck "create links from URLs" and open the document again, you'll find the hot zones gone unless ID is specifically exporting them. No, you can't take control of that setting for your users - it's intended to help people by removing the need to copy and paste addresses from plain text (and to get round that not being possible in a secured document).

There are some hacks to stop it happening by breaking the pattern match, but it of course also breaks the validity of the address if it's copied and pasted. If it's only a human-readable address you want, insert a hair space one side of the @ symbol (or for a web address, insert one after the colon in http://) and Acrobat will ignore it.

Hair spaces are of course in ID's menus under type..insert white space. You can insert anything, but hair spaces are invisible to a human. It may do something funky to a screen-reader though.

UVSAR,

Yes, I had thought Acrobat was parsing these addresses, didn't know how it worked, thanks much!

Also thanks for responding so quickly, and on Sunday too. Saved my bacon.

Inserting hairspaces worked, but I had to put them on both sides of the @. If only inserted on the left, Acrobat would try to create a link. For instance, "surfer [at] hotmail [dot] com" would become a link to "@hotmail.com".Best,

You can remove them manually by running this script (copied from the scripting reference file):

// remove all links from the document
for ( var p = 0; p < this.numPages; p++)
{
var b = this.getPageBox("Crop", p);
this.removeLinks(p, b);
}

try67 - that works if the links are "real" - i.e. stored in the DOM. If auto-create is active, Acrobat or Reader will turn them on dynamically. If you don't know it's happening (and most people don't) it can be really frustrating to work out why.

It'd be nice if you could set a highlight style for an auto-created link, so you can tell it's not in the PDF, but hey... can't have everything.