Re: Clickable links in saved PDF files of Web pages

[Esther]

Hi Simon,

There seems to be a bug with the reporting of the Mouse cursor  
position in TextEdit and Preview so that it starts reading the  
beginning of the document.  When I press the control key to cut this  
off, and then check the position again (Contol-Option-Fn-F5  on my  
laptop) it seems to get the position correctly.  On the occasions  
when I can't route my mouse cursor to my VoiceOver cursor I try  
turning VoiceOver off and on again, and then issuing the command once  
more.  (This does happen sometimes, and is one of the reasons that I  
prefer to have my cursors tracking.)

When I click on the location of links in PDF files printed from web  
pages, what I first do is make sure that my VoiceOver cursor doesn't  
extend further than the words that appear in the link on the  
corresponding web page.  In fact,  you can have your VoiceOver cursor  
on a single word or letter that would be over the link when you route  
your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver cursor.

I don't think this is a Tiger vs. Leopard thing.  This looks as  
though Apple is planning to build in the link functionality in the  
PDFs it creates.   I've only found the "link activation" by clicking  
(VO-keys-Shift-Space) to work in Preview.

Try adjusting what is in your VoiceOver cursor so that it is  
shortened down to a word before you route your mouse cursor to the  
VoiceOver cursor and do your "click".    I haven't tried every type  
of link.  You might also want to hit the control key so that you cut  
short the VoiceOver announcements in the Preview page, and then press  
the control key again so that you can hear VoiceOver start its  
messages when it opens the browser link.

Let us know what happens.  If I can get to a machine with Leopard on  
it I'll try some experiments, but that probably won't happen in the  
near future.

Cheers,

Esther

On Aug 5, 2008, at 2:59 AM, Simon Cavendish wrote:

Dear esther,

I am referring to the part of your message that talks about the  
need to route the mouse cursor to the voiceover cursor in a PDF  
document in order to be able to lclick on a link. I find that I am  
not able to route my mouse cursor to my voiceover cursor in the  
first place which makes the clicking of a link impossible. When I  
check what is under my mouse cursor, it seems that my mouse is  
stuck at the beginning of the document I am viewing. Additionally,  
I find a similar behaviour in Textedit when I try to route my mouse  
to the Voiceover cursor. I don't have the two cursors linked. I run  
Leopard 10.54. Might Tiger behave differently in the matter? Has  
anyone else found a similar baffling behaviour under Leopard in  
Preview or Textedit?

Maybe I am not doing something I should be.

Look forward to hearing from you.

With best regards

Simon
On 2 Aug 2008, at 23:14, Esther wrote:

Hi all,

The subject says it all:
Clickable links in saved PDF files of Web pages

The Mac's print command (Command-P) lets you save output as PDF  
pages,
and this doesn't just work for text files or word documents.   
Specifically,
this can be used to save a copy of web pages, and can be a handy  
way to
keep receipts of web transactions or information like product keys  
and
serial numbers.

What surprised me, though, is that the recent PDF files of web  
pages in
Safari 3, generated with the print command and viewed with Preview,
contain clickable links.  They're not labeled, but if you do a mouse
click with Control-Option-Shift-Space at the location of a link it's
like clicking on the link in the web page.  Your mouse cursor must be
at that location when you click for this to work, so if you don't  
have
your VoiceOver navigation set for "Mouse Cursor tracks VoiceOver  
Cursor"
you need to do a VO-Command-Shift-F5 (or on my laptop
VO-Command-Shift-Fn-F5) to route your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver
cursor before clicking.

Now normally you might not be able to tell which words are associated
with web page links, but I had saved a listing of a page of free e- 
book
downloads so I could match the descriptions to the files.  After each
title there were the download formats: PDF, HTML, HTML zip, and Mobi.
If you read through the page and have your VoiceOver cursor (and  
hence,
mouse cursor) at "HTML" at the time you click, then the HTML file  
for the
book comes up in Safari.  And if Safari isn't open at that time,  
clicking
on the PDF link will start it up and bring up the page.

If you save a PDF of the Blind Cool Tech podcasts page, where the
titles are links to the podcast mp3 files, then clicking on the title
words of programs will load the mp3 files into the Safari browser.
You have to be somewhere in the link when you click, so a word at the
beginning will do, but if your VoiceOver cursor is tracking a whole
line (in the case of the previous book downloads), the specified
location that you "click" won't necessarily be defined.

I'm pretty sure this started with Safari 3, because I put off  
updating
to this as long as possible due to known glitchy behavior with Tiger.
I'm running 10.4.11 (latest version of Tiger) and only updated my
browser to Safari 3 because the dot Mac transition required Safari 3.

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Esther