The world of Internet is a land of links that redirect us to a new informative webpage or navigate us to a specified page/part within a file. PDF has the ability to embed links too. But that link in your PDF might come with inadequate anchor text, might be wrongly placed. There are ways to make the links in your PDF look good. Just let me outline several methods to edit hyperlinks in a PDF file, we will be able to create, remove, even replace an existing link.
The first method looks at editing PDF hyperlinks with full control using a desktop program, then other 2 methods to edit hyperlinks in PDF for free will follow.
Edit Hyperlink in A PDF: You Can Add, Remove or Replace Links
When picking a tool for work, I follow a rule: being proficient with a single all-in-one app, rather than jumping between various tools with different features. There are many PDF tools available, but it is not hard for me to give the best single recommendation, I pick Adobe Acrobat.
Pricing may be the reason stops you from being subscribed to an Adobe product plan, but Adobe changed the pricing. There are tiered plans starting from $12.99/month to $29.99/month to experience all features from Adobe products. If pricing is not standing in the way for a sign up, Acrobat should be a must-have app on your machine.
It has easy editing tools and a huge range of well-though options to handle a PDFs, you can create PDF, export PDF, edit and write on PDF, scan and perform OCR on scans, fill forms, sign, compare, annotate, highlight, flatten a PDF. As you play around more tools in Acrobat, you will get more techniques and tools to optimize a PDF document.
The link editor in Acrobat is really powerful, it lets users:
- Add, remove or replace a link
- Auto create links from URLs
- Append all links on page
- View web links
- Customize appearance
- Lock, or add a new action, etc.
How to Edit Hyperlinks in PDF with Adobe Acrobat?
- Get a free 7-day trial copy of Adobe Acrobat, install and fire up the app on your machine, it supports Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone.
- Drag and drop a PDF file to Acrobat and open the file, click Edit PDF from right panel.
- To add hyperlink in PDF: Go to Link> Add/Edit Web or Document Link, choose the anchor text, set up link appearance and choose a link action, click Next to add the hyperlink.
- To delete hyperlink in PDF: Go to Link> Remove Web Links.
- To replace hyperlink in PDF, double click on the hyperlink, go to Link Actions, choose Open a web link and click on Edit to replace the link. Click OK.
- Lastly, go to File and hit Save.
How to Edit Link in PDF Online without Paying
Don’t want to shell out any money on a subscription? You can use online free PDF tools right inside your web browser to edit hyperlinks in your PDFs. But there will be limits.
Here we use Sejda PDF Editor.
The Good:
- It can add new link and edit existing link
- It can link to an external URL, link to email address, link to phone number or link to internal page
- It offers a lot of editing tools: add text, fill form, insert image, sign, whiteout text, annotate, add shapes, etc.
The Bad:
- Text properties are changed when adding new text or editing PDF text in Sejda
- There are limits for free use, up to 200 pages or 50MB and only 3 tasks per hour
How-to process:
- Navigate to sejda.com/pdf-editor ,once you load up the web interface, upload your PDF.
- Click on Links, Sejda will display the hyperlink and allows you to edit it.
- To add a link, click on Links button and select the text area where to put the hyperlink. To remove the hyperlink in your PDF, click on Delete link, or remove the web address and leave it empty.
- Hit Apply changes and download the PDF with hyperlinks.
How to Edit Hyperlink in PDF Free with PDFgear?
There is another open source PDF program that let your edit hyperlinks in a PDF, that is PDFgear. It is available across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, helping users edit, create, convert, fill, organize and protect a PDF file. Though not all available tools will work as good as you think, such as losing formatting when editing texts in the app. With PDFgear, editing hyperlinks in PDF is easy.
- Open the PDF in PDFgear.
- Head to Home> Link.
- To add a link, just select the anchor text first, then choose Link to URL and enter the web link.
- To remove a link from PDF. Just select the hyperlinks, then press Delete key to remove them.
- Lastly, save your file.
Mac Users: Remove Hyperlink in PDF with Preview
If you are a Mac user and just need to remove the hyperlink in your file, it can be easily done in Preview.
- Open PDF in Preview.
- Click on Inspector tool to display the links.
- Select the hyperlinks you want to remove and press Delete key to remove.
- Head to File> Save.
Conclusion
To add or remove a hyperlink from your PDF only, Sejda Online and PDFgear the open source are solid options. But if you want advanced editing features, Adobe Acrobat is always the ultimate solution.