Can I make all links in a document go live?

April 12, 2023 11:00 AM

I have a book layout that was done in Apple Pages and my client wants it turned into an epub. He also wants all the web links to become live links in the epub. Is there any way to do this all at once?

I know how to do the links one by one, but there are a lot of them, and he's not likely to want to pay for the several hours it will take.

Apple's doc pages suggest that it should be possible using Edit/Substitutions/Smart Web and Email Links, but this has had no effect, whether or not the text was selected.

I would be willing to try running the document through Microsoft Word or some other editor if it would flip all those web links at once.

posted by zadcat to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Changing that "substitution" won't change what's already been typed. It changes your input mode.

However, it seems that if you turn it on and then go through the document and just add a space after each URL and then delete it, it will ensmartify that link. You'll still need to do some hand work, but not as much. Unfortunately, Pages' search and replace is rudimentary and doesn't seem to support wildcards, much less regular expressions.

I'd avoid document translation, as any formatting is likely to get altered. Probably won't save time.
posted by adamrice at 11:56 AM on April 12, 2023

Seems like you could automate adamrice's instructions by doing a search and replace all for ".com" or ".org" or whatever the links end in, and add in the spaces then repeat the search and replace to take them back out again.
In Word that would look like
Search: [.com]
Replace All: [.com ]
and then
Search: [.com ]
Replace All: [.com]
I imagine Apple Pages has a similar function.
posted by QuakerMel at 4:11 PM on April 12, 2023