Dear Esther,
Somewhat belated response to your e-mail but I want to say a big thank
you for this tip. I've already been using it regularly to save
documents as PDF files. It is a gem of a tip, Esther, and thank you so
much for sharing.
With best wishes
Simon
On 2 Aug 2008, at 23:14, Esther wrote:
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
