Hi all, The subject says it all: Clickable links in saved PDF files of Web pages
The Mac's print command (Command-P) lets you save output as PDF pages, and this doesn't just work for text files or word documents. Specifically, this can be used to save a copy of web pages, and can be a handy way to keep receipts of web transactions or information like product keys and serial numbers. What surprised me, though, is that the recent PDF files of web pages in Safari 3, generated with the print command and viewed with Preview, contain clickable links. They're not labeled, but if you do a mouse click with Control-Option-Shift-Space at the location of a link it's like clicking on the link in the web page. Your mouse cursor must be at that location when you click for this to work, so if you don't have your VoiceOver navigation set for "Mouse Cursor tracks VoiceOver Cursor" you need to do a VO-Command-Shift-F5 (or on my laptop VO-Command-Shift-Fn-F5) to route your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver cursor before clicking. Now normally you might not be able to tell which words are associated with web page links, but I had saved a listing of a page of free e-book downloads so I could match the descriptions to the files. After each title there were the download formats: PDF, HTML, HTML zip, and Mobi. If you read through the page and have your VoiceOver cursor (and hence, mouse cursor) at "HTML" at the time you click, then the HTML file for the book comes up in Safari. And if Safari isn't open at that time, clicking on the PDF link will start it up and bring up the page. If you save a PDF of the Blind Cool Tech podcasts page, where the titles are links to the podcast mp3 files, then clicking on the title words of programs will load the mp3 files into the Safari browser. You have to be somewhere in the link when you click, so a word at the beginning will do, but if your VoiceOver cursor is tracking a whole line (in the case of the previous book downloads), the specified location that you "click" won't necessarily be defined. I'm pretty sure this started with Safari 3, because I put off updating to this as long as possible due to known glitchy behavior with Tiger. I'm running 10.4.11 (latest version of Tiger) and only updated my browser to Safari 3 because the dot Mac transition required Safari 3. Food for thought. Cheers, Esther
