Have you ever had PDF files that you wanted to make changes to? It can be a problem when you don’t have the original source document. Here’s how to edit, extract or clear hyperlinks in PDFs.
For various reasons, the original document that was used to create a PDF file may not be available. It could be lost, created by someone else, corrupt, and so on. Making changes to the PDF can therefore be difficult because they are not really designed to be easy to edit.
It just isn’t an editable file format. However, PDF files can be exported to Microsoft Word or Excel file formats using Adobe Export PDF. It is a web-based service that lets you convert as many PDFs to Microsoft Office documents as you want for a couple of dollars a month.
There are some free utilities that can help with editing PDF files and one called PDF Link Editor enables the web links within PDF files to be modified. It has limited features, but it may be sufficient in some circumstances, such as where a URL has changed and you need to update some PDFs that contain them.
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PDF Link Editor
All the functions are on buttons in the toolbar and the first is used to open a file.
The window is divided into two and on the right is a preview of the PDF document. On the left is a list of web links that were found in it. It shows the link text, the URL, the page number it is on and there is a checkbox to select each link.
Clear Links: PDF Link Editor can clear all the web links in a PDF document and save it under a different filename. It does not change the text attributes, so if the link is in the standard blue underlined style, it will be the same afterwards. It just won’t be a link. This could be a bit confusing for people that read the PDF.
Extract Links: This toolbar button saves all the web links in the PDF as a plain text file containing URLs. I found a better way to extract the links and it is possible to click the table in the window and press Ctrl+A followed by Ctrl+C to copy it. Open an Excel spreadsheet and pressing Ctrl+V pastes in the link text, URL, and page number in a neat little table.
Replace Links: This function enables the URL for a link to be replaced. Select a link and enter a URL, click Replace and the link is updated. The document is saved as a new PDF with a new name. The first time I used this I accidentally replaced all the links with the same URL. It is an easy mistake to make, but you can always reload the original file and try again.
Add Links: It is possible to add new links to a PDF document. A search facility enables you to find a word or phrase and then you can enter a URL to turn it into a web link. It isn’t quite perfect and it turns every occurrence of the text into a link. You cannot choose just one. The main limitation of this is that it does not change the style of the text, so when reading it, you would not know that some text was a link unless the mouse hovers over it.
This utility is not perfect and a few tweaks could make it even better but it is free and it works. It could be just what you need to update an old PDF with new links.
It is possible to protect PDF files with security features that prevent the contents being changed and they can even be encrypted. I did not try PDF Link Editor with PDFs with security features enabled. I suspect it won’t work.
For normal PDFs without security, PDF Link Editor worked well.
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