Automatic web links in PDF files

Orbeon Forms can automatically produce nice PDF files without any extra work (see the documentation).

While PDFs are useful for printing and archival, they also have a few smarter features. For example, web links in a PDF file can be made clickable, and this is something that Orbeon Forms leverages:

1. Links in rich text content are clickable and open your web browser to the target link.
2. Links identified in regular input fields and text areas are automatically highlighted and clickable as well. [1]

And now we have added detection and automatic linking of email addresses in input fields and text areas as well. Here is an example of PDF output with the various types of links Orbeon Forms detects:

Examples of automatic links in a PDF file

This enhancement will be included in Orbeon Forms 4.9. And for the curious, you can see the regular expressions we use for this.

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1. This feature was introduced with Orbeon Forms 4.6, but we hadn’t covered in a blog post yet!  ↩