Making hyperlinks from URLs in InDesign is not a difficult process, though it can be a tedious one, and there are some potential pitfalls you need to avoid. One way to make the job a whole lot easier is to use a script by Keith Gilbert. You can download it at his website. It’s offered free of charge, but if you find it useful consider showing your appreciation here.
Once you have the script installed, you need to create a character style in your InDesign document called Hyperlink. Then copy a URL from your web browser or other source, select the text you want to apply the hyperlink to, and run the script. Boom! The hyperlink and character style are instantly applied to the selected text. Importantly, the hyperlink does not use the Shared Destination option (which gets my vote as the single worst feature in all of InDesign). If you want to know why using shared destinations is such a bad idea, check out this post.
For maximum ease and efficiency in creating hyperlinks, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to run the script. Command/Ctrl+K is pretty much the universal shortcut in other programs for creating hyperlinks, but that one is taken in InDesign by the Preferences command. But you could pick something close. I settled on Option+K which is not used for anything else.
For the full instructions on assigning a keyboard shortcut to a script, check out this post.
This article was last modified on July 3, 2021
This article was first published on July 3, 2021
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