Any workaround for Keynote PDF link butchering?

TidBITS Talk
1

Latest macOS, latest Keynote. Define a hyperlink in Keynote. Works great as long as slides displayed in Keynote.

Then export slides to PDF. In resulting PDF link displays right, but hyperlink functionality now broken. Turns out although the link displays right to the eye, it’s getting resolved as hszps://… instead of https://… and obviously that type of ligatures break hyperlinking. Any way to get around this?

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Indulge me, can you replace the two ts in https: with two capital Ts? See if that fixes it?

3

Sure, with capital Ts the hyperlink functionality is preserved.

It’s the ligatures. I’ve reported this bug to Apple.

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This means that there may be another fix.

I’m not familiar with Keynote but in PowerPoint, pasting a URL automatically converts it to a link. But you can edit the link’s properties from a context-menu popup (or its shortcut key). So you can set the text to be different from the URL.

If Keynote has a similar property page for links (I assume it does), then maybe you can set the hyperlink to have https:// and let the text part use the ligature, for pretty-printing.

5

Or, in Keynote, you can set the text properties to not use ligatures. Select the text of the URL, and then in the “Format” side panel, choose the “Text” tab, then use the gear pop-up menu to set “Ligatures” to “Use none”.

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The iWork team at Apple got back to me after I had filed my bug report.

And sure enough, today’s Keynote update (12.1) has fixed the issue. :+1:

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