Link Annotations

PSPDFKit for Web supports common types of link annotations, including page, web, and email links. Tapping on such a link will automatically invoke the saved action (see PDF Actions) as well as the correct event, such as changing the page or opening a URL.

Link annotations are always read only to the user; the position and action can only be changed programmatically using the regular annotations API.

For more information on links, please refer to the API documentation.

Customizing Link Behavior

It’s possible to execute custom application code and even prevent the default click behavior for links by registering an event handler for the annotations.onPress event on the PSPDFKit instance:

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PSPDFKit.load(...).then(instance => {
  instance.addEventListener("annotations.press", event => {
    if (event.annotation instanceof PSPDFKit.Annotations.LinkAnnotation) {
      event.preventDefault();
      console.log(event);
    }
  });
});

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PSPDFKit.load(...).then(function (instance) {
  instance.addEventListener("annotations.press", function (event) {
    if (event.annotation instanceof PSPDFKit.Annotations.LinkAnnotation) {
      event.preventDefault();
      console.log(event);
    }
  });
});

Read more about the AnnotationsPressEvent.

Autodetecting Links

PSPDFKit can optionally analyze the page contents and automatically add links to URLs. This is slightly expensive since text needs to be parsed and analyzed, but it’s done in a background process, so in most cases it’s not noticeably slower. This feature is turned off by default.

You can use Configuration#enableAutomaticLinkExtraction to enable autodetection on Standalone-based deployments or use the AUTOMATIC_LINK_EXTRACTION environment variable to enable it on Server-backed deployments.