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I started using showkeys in one of my documents and see this error

\pdfendlink ended up in different nesting level than \pdfstartlink

A bit of google suggests that this "happens when hyperref is used under pdftex and a citation splits across a page boundary". (See: http://tug.org/errors.html).

But this package is only useful at drafting stage where the text is changing frequently i.e. the chance of the error is high. Is there a general way to smoothly use showkeys with hyperref? Thanks.

Leo Liu
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  • I've never had a problem using showkeys with hyperref, although the hyperref documentation claims that they aren't completely compatible, and the hyperref author is not willing to fix that. I load showkeys before hyperref, which may be relevant. I think you need to give us a minimal test case. – Lev Bishop Aug 11 '10 at 14:22
  • The thing about the minimal example is that it is not easy to construct but I will see if I can come up with something. – Leo Liu Aug 11 '10 at 15:59
  • you can use the lipsum package to get some dummy text to construct your minimal example. (Or simply accept Charles' answer below.) – Bruno Le Floch Feb 25 '11 at 19:35
  • @LevBishop This is strange; from the way showkeys works I'd have guessed the other way round (modifications to \label by showkeys must come after hyperref). – Stephan Lehmke Nov 20 '12 at 05:12
  • For reference, the correct solution is given by http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/65224/3406 (I think). The problem disappeared for me once I updated hyperref as described in that answer. The corresponding question also has a MWE. – Faheem Mitha Jan 04 '14 at 19:07
  • The claim about updating hyperref package at https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/63819 did not work for me. The \mbox trick worked for me, though the result is not pretty typesetting. – Finn Årup Nielsen Mar 10 '15 at 14:18

10 Answers10

92

I figured out the location of the link causing the error using the [draft] option in the hyperref package definition, as explained in this 2002 mailing list post by James A. Bednar:

... when this error occurs, write down the page number where pdflatex aborted, then add the "draft" option to hyperref:

\usepackage[draft]{hyperref}

and recompile the document. PDF output will now be generated, the problematic link should be the citation whose latter half begins the page where pdflatex aborted. After slightly rearranging the text to avoid the linebreak, the [draft] option can be removed.

(I tried user22326's useful suggestion to use the [debug] option in the hyperref package definition, however, this didn't help me in finding the location (in the log, or in the latex file) of the link causing the error. Not even after I figured it out using the draft option solution.)

Rabarberski
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    This definitely worked for me, and seems to be the best way to proceed with this issue that I encountered many times. – jibe Aug 12 '14 at 07:55
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    Instead of rearranging the text, one could "repair" the boxing/nesting level of the closing \pdfendlink. See this workaround . – AlexG Jun 01 '17 at 08:21
  • What if we do not rearrange the text and just go on with the draft option? – lonesome Jul 13 '17 at 04:11
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    In my case, hyperref is loaded by the class file so set I the draft option using \hypersetup{draft} in my preamble. – Warrick Jan 22 '18 at 08:51
  • @lonesome with the draft option, links are clickable – Franck Dernoncourt Feb 17 '18 at 23:51
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    Got stuck with this answer for a while. It seems to be working for everyone, UNLESS the broken link is in the bibliography! For that case, another solution below worked like magic: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/449633/23048 ! – Dr_Zaszuś Mar 07 '19 at 16:57
18

I use an alternative, which gives a better rendering to me:

\bibliographystyle{your-format}
\interlinepenalty=10000
\bibliography{your-bibtex-file}

It prevents breaking a citation across two pages. Hence, hyperlinks in a citation cannot be broken. It solves two problems at the same time for me.

Tom
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  • It you are using biber and biblatex, you may use this solution: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/43260/biblatex-no-pagebreak-in-bibliography-entry – Tom Feb 09 '22 at 13:36
17

I have just resolved a similar error by putting the offending citation inside an \mbox. You just have to figure out where is the offending citation, for example, by successively commenting and uncommenting your LaTeX file. It worked for me, so I hope this works for anyone else, as unfortunately, the error message is not helpful (as usual in LaTeX).

mljrg
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12

Sometimes, the links are created by the bibliography, from items with URL fields. A solution that helps in this case and preserves clickable links is to make sure that each \bibitem is typeset without column or page breaks:

\let\oldbibitem\bibitem
\def\bibitem{\vfill\oldbibitem}

A \vfill rubber length is inserted before each \bibitem. This produces ugly output that is nevertheless "good enough" for a draft. Don't forget to remove this hack just before releasing the document.

(For a general solution, we also need to Wrap natbib macros \citep and \citet. No luck with this one yet.)

Community
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krlmlr
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8

Without an MWE, it's hard to say something that we can be sure will fix the problem. I haven't, for the obvious reason, tested any of what follows.

If the problem arises when:

  1. showkeys is used near the end of the document, then you can force a page eject if the command is used near the end of the document. E.g.: \let\urshowkeys=\showkeys \def\showkeys{\needspace{5ex}\urshowkeys} (requires needspace package).
  2. Likewise if it occurs when a hyperref is used near the end of the document.
  3. If it occurs because the link is split between the main body and the margin text, then the best thing might be to write your own wrappers that puts the label in the body text, so that the problem doesn't arise. This should be easy, and I'm guessing this is an acceptable workaround given that the text is a draft.
Charles Stewart
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    This entry was very helpful but failed to let me know how to find the problematic citation when using multiple files (pdflatex wouldn't point to the right line). Although trivial, this might save some time to some users out there. Use the general option [debug] in the hyperref package and go through the pdflatex log to find the exact citation that is causing the problem. Cheers! –  Nov 20 '12 at 03:36
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    For this wondering about it, MWE = minimal working example. – Rabarberski Nov 29 '13 at 09:20
  • @user2236: the [debug] approach seemed promising, but I couldn't find any clues in the log. I've inserted an answer using the [draft] option instead. – Rabarberski Jan 15 '14 at 10:16
8

See this issue. A workaround is to let links break across pages by adding this to the preamble:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd\@combinedblfloats{\box\@outputbox}{\unvbox\@outputbox}{}{\errmessage{\noexpand patch failed}}
\makeatother
DilithiumMatrix
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Place \hypersetup{draft} before \begin{document} will solve the problem.

Ripon Patgiri
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2

The following two lines in the preamble solve the problem:

\let\oldhref\href
\renewcommand{\href}[2]{\oldhref{#1}{\hbox{#2}}}
Andrej Debenjak
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2

In my case, the problem was a reference that was stretching over two pages like Miller (2019) where Miller was on page k and (2019) was on page k+1.

dopexxx
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1

In one case the offending link seemed to be coming from the bibliography link generation. This might help:

sed '/\\bibitem/ s/ /~/g' file.bbl > tmp.bbl && mv tmp.bbl file.bbl
Finn Årup Nielsen
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