A Script to List Hyperlinks From Your InDesign Document

A couple of weeks ago, I needed a list of all the hyperlinks used in an InDesign document. (As it happens, it was for our mammoth All Star Tips feature in the final issue of InDesign Magazine, #150.)

The information I needed—the dozens of links in that feature—was buried just out of easy reach. The Hyperlinks panel offered many automatically named “Hyperlink” and a sequential number.  And the text in the panel was selectable, but un-copy-able. 

In short, the destination URLs were not visible without physically editing the links one by one. 

“There’s got to be an easier way,” I kept muttering to myself.

I kept looking for that elusive obscure feature (“of the week, eek, eek”) that would give a simple report—something very much like Copy Info for Selected Links in the Links panel menu. If it’s there, I sure couldn’t find it.

So what’s the first thing a creative pro should think when there’s something that your software should be able to do but doesn’t? You guessed it: “Maybe there’s a script for that.”

A little web sleuthing brought me to a deep link to a page on the Adobe Support Community’s InDesign section, where a member had posted some not-quite-working code for a “script to extract hyperlinks from InDesign file with page number.”

Manan Joshi came to the rescue! The InDesign Automation and Plugin development consultant, a prolific contributor to the Adobe discussions, had responded to the original poster with modifications to create a tiny script that did exactly what the original user needed—and what I also needed at that moment.

“I feel good that the information helped you out and that in itself is a very satisfactory feeling,” Manan replied when I wrote him to make sure I was attributing the authorship of the script properly.

A crowbar for your hyperlinks

The script is simple, but you will need to give it a name—I used “hyperlinks”—and save it as a text file with the extension .jsx. Follow these instructions to install it.

Open your document, run the script, and it will display a dialog box with all the links. 

Click “OK,” and that data will be saved into a text document, which you can then use with abandon.

I was able to do a quick search and replace in BBEdit to add a tab before the URL so I could paste the whole list into Excel in column form. Maybe you would need a list like this to very easily construct SQL queries or build full HTML source code around these links.

The point is, if you ever need this information, you will have a very specific reason—and this simple solution will give you the digital crowbar you need to get your links out of InDesign.

A big shout out to Manan Joshi and the pros who hang around these discussions. They give so much of themselves and their time to the InDesign user community.