Reply To: Active URLs for PDF and Ebook

I never saved my post. Anyway:

1) Breaking the URLs properly for print books is necessary and are not artistic breaks. There are rules in place for breaking URLs (see the Chicago Manual for example). For print books, all punctuation/dashes/underscores, etc., cannot end a line–they must start the next line. The exception is the double slashes. And the URL cannot automatically hyphenate. I have no choice but to use discretionary line breaks to make the URLs break properly for the print edition.

2) The discretionary line breaks do cause a bad URL, which I’ve had to edit in the InDesign file by right clicking on the link and editing the URL (i.e., removing the extra spaces caused by the discretionary line breaks). I was wondering if there was an easier way than editing each URL by hand. If the experts feel it can’t be automated to edit URLs (i.e., removing spaces) and they must be done individually–then so be it. I don’t have a problem with that and we can charge the client accordingly. I’d just like to know so I don’t waste my tme trying to find way to automate it.

3) For an example of what I’m talking about, one simply needs to look at a notes section of a book and see URLs line that are more than one line long.

4) That is all I really want to do. Keep the URLs active when I use discretionary line breaks. InDesign puts a space into the actual URL link (which I have to edit and remove).

5) I respectfully disagree that the information I need should not be part of a forum thread, as the needs and examples are not complicated.

I also typed up a lengthy post because I wanted to answer any questions ahead of time. And to let folks know what I needed, how I was currently doing it, etc.

Dwayne