I have had no luck generating a PDF from a Safari web page while preserving links. The links show up as a different color on the PDF. But, when one taps on the link, it does nothing. It doesn’t matter whether I use Create/Make PDF or Print/pinch-zoom to generate the PDF.
Is there a solution to this issue?
Of course, on macOS, it’s quite simple to generate a PDF of a web site with all the links properly functional in the PDF.
Does this only happen in Safari? I use Chromeas my main browser instead of Safari, and as a test I just saved this webpage as a PDF then opened in Preview, and it opened perfectly fine back in Chrome.
On iOS?
I just tried several web sites using Chrome on iOS: nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, a random search on google.com. In all cases, when I generate a PDF from the web site, none of the links in the PDF work.
As far as I know links never work when creating PDFs from the iOS system. I‘m interested in a workaround as well.
Try saving as a web archive?
Andrew
By the way, my apologies for my initial reply - I must have missed the “on iOS” part of the question, and I gave an example based on using my Mac.
I just tried to save a PDF using Firefox on my iPhone and ran into the same problem where the link … wouldn’t.
Since all iOS web browsers are required to use Safari’s Webkit underpinnings, I’d suggest everyone send a Feedback to Apple about this.
Yes, this is what I’ve been doing — but, WebArchive doesn’t scratch a particular itch. I use DevonThink, which provides me an option to save as a WebArchive. That part is convenient. Unfortunately, one can’t annotate a WebArchive like a PDF. Therefore, I resort to also storing a PDF version on which I can write on the margins, circle stuff, etc.
As a workaround have you tried “save as pdf to Books”? The resulting pdf does not preserve the links but it takes the target of the link (the URL) and inserts it in parentheses after the link word. You don’t say if you need/want a live link or not, but this might be good enough. From Books you can always export it to GoodReader etc. If you send it to the Mac, the url is live.
Scott