Script of the Month: Text Hyperlink Formatter

This article appeared in Issue 145 of InDesign Magazine.

If you work with a lot of hyperlinks in your InDesign documents, you know that it can sometimes be a pain to format them—especially if they weren’t formatted correctly when they were created. By itself, InDesign doesn’t give you the ability to quickly format all text hyperlinks in a document. But our Script of the Month does just that!

When you run the script (written by Brian Pifer of Design Time Solutions), you get a dialog box where you can choose a character style to apply to every hyperlink text source in your InDesign file (Figure 1).

You can also use the script to solve a rather annoying problem that happens when you remove hyperlinks in InDesign: the character styling stays behind. So what is no longer a hyperlink source still looks like one. Usually this is tedious a manual cleanup job. But with the script you can instantly remove all phantom formatting by applying [None] before you remove the hyperlinks. You can download the script for free here.

Note that the script only works on all hyperlinks in a document. There’s no option for you to target specific links or pages. If you need to change the formatting of just a few specific hyperlinks, select them in the Hyperlinks panel and then choose Edit Hyperlink from the panel menu. This opens the Edit Hyperlink dialog box where you can pick a different character style to apply to the selected hyperlink sources.