Thursday, June 29, 2017

Batch Edit URL Links in PDF Files


Version I: Direct purchase using PayPal (Older version: $75 only per license)!



Version II: Direct purchase using PayPal (New version, $125 per license)!


This powerful little tool allows you to edit all the links in a PDF based on a simple search and replace command, and it can be used to process an entire folder (and all of its sub-folders) in a single go.
The tool can edit not just URL links, but also links to files, and convert them to URL links.

UPDATE (29-06-2017): It's now also possible to perform Search & Replace commands using a Regular Expression, including back references. This feature is included in both versions of the tools, as well as in the demo versions.

The application's dialog, with the new Regular Expression option


UPDATE (16-07-2015):  Yet another new feature for this tool, an option to export all the URL links in all of the selected files to a text file, included in v. 2 of the tool.
In addition, there's now a free demo version of the v. 2 tool, available as well.

NEW FEATURE IV (25-12-2014): The tool can now process links with JavaScript-actions that use the launchURL method.


NEW FEATURE IV (14-11-2014): The tool now also processes bookmarks, as well as fields and links.

NEW FEATURE III (19-06-2014): Now this tool will also process links associated with button form fields, not just Link objects.

NEW FEATURE II: A new version of this tool is now available, which allows you to edit the URLs of your links in multiple files, using multiple commands, specified in a list.
So instead of having to make one change at a time, you can now run as many Search & Replace or Append commands as you wish!
The new tool is available for only $125, and can be purchased through here.

 
New interface of the tool:
(click to enlarge)


There's still a free demo version of the tool available (old version). The demo version will process up to 3 links on the first 3 pages of the first 3 files. The full version has no such limitations, of course.

How the older version looks like:

(click to enlarge)

Imagine the following situation:
You have a set of PDF files which point to your website:
"Welcome" links to http://www.mysite.com/welcome.html
"Intro page" links to http://www.mysite.com/intro.html
"Next" links to http://www.mysite.com/page1.html
etc.
But then you decide to change your domain name to http://www.mynewsite.org and now you need to update all of your PDF files!

Well, this tool will do that for you. You just specify the folder to run it on, the Search & Replace action, the text to match ("mysite.com") and the text to replace it with ("mynewsite.org"), and voila! All of your files are updated in a second, and you get a detailed log of all the changes made to them.

This tool can also append text to the beginning or end of your URL links, so if you want to add a new URL parameter to the end of all of your links, you can easily do so.

This tool does not require you to actually have Acrobat. All you need is to have Java installed on your computer.

If you have any questions regarding this tool, you can contact me directly.

13 comments:

Max said...

Hello.

I have similar task - change URLs/e-mails-like text in PDF file to real URL/e-mails.

Is it possible? Or should I look into Acrobat Javascript?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Gilad D. (try67) said...

Hi Max,

Acrobat has a built-in function to create links from (full) e-mail addresses and websites. However, things like "www.google.com" will not be converted. If you're interested in a script that will create such links, contact me by e-mail.

Unknown said...

Wow, what a great helping tool! This saved my day. PDF document 132 Pages, 813 Links. Great! Thank you.

Unknown said...

Hi,

What if the links in the PDF were created by choosing the "Run a javascript" option and are in the following format:

app.launchURL("http://somewhere.com/something", true);

I ran the jar file but it doesn't look like any of the links got changed.

Gilad D. (try67) said...

Hi David,

In that case you'll need to convert them to "real" links first, using this tool:
http://try67.blogspot.com/2011/09/convert-javascript-links-to-real-web.html

Unknown said...

Thanks for the quick response! Is there a demo for that script? I'd like to try it out before I purchase both. Thanks!

Gilad D. (try67) said...

Not at the moment, but I'll work on creating one...

Gilad D. (try67) said...

New demo versions of both tools now available... You can download them from the product page.

Unknown said...

Thanks for doing that so quickly. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time getting the desired result. The script runs and says it's "done," but when I go to the first javascript link in the copy of the document, it's still in the form "app.launchURL." Would it be helpful for you to have the PDF in question? I can send it to your Gmail address.

Gilad D. (try67) said...

Hi David,

Yeah, please contact me by email and I'll check what's going on...

Unknown said...

Hi Gilad D.,

I have a PDF with 100s of "regular" hyperlinks. These hyperlinks were set when I converted my Excel file to PDF. In Excel, I added hyperlinks to cells via the 'hyperlink' section.

What I need to do is convert these hyperlinks in the PDF to JavaScript-enabled hyperlinks since I need these hyperlinks to open in a new tab/window. The only way to do this is by converting the "regular" hyperlinks to JavaScript-enabled hyperlinks (so I can append app.LaunchURL or whatever appendage is needed to trigger the link to open in a new tab/window upon a user clicking it).

Will this tool be able to do that for me?

I can always write my own commands to go unzip the PDF contents and find/replace the regular hyperlink syntax with the JavaScript syntax...but that would take me a great deal of time to research the structure on how hyperlinks in PDFs are stored and structured.

Unknown said...

Hello there. I have a number of hyperlinks to other PDFs (sometimes the destination is specific pages) that need to be edited quickly within a bookmarked PDF. Will your tool help? Most of the issue is that the links were not created as relative paths.

Gilad D. (try67) said...

@Unknown

Yes, you can use this tool to edit such links.

Sorry about the delay in replying. The comment was stuck in a hidden moderation queue.