How to disable links completely using hyperref package?

Question

A have a LaTeX paper I want to submit to the EDAS system. EDAS doesn't want papers to have links and suggests to 'remove the hyperref package from your file'. However, if I do that, my compilation breaks because of some hyperref options in my tex files (and also \url definitions, I think).

I want to keep everything as it is, and just disable the linking feature of hyperref to create a link-free version of my PDF. How can I do this?

Following the hyperref documentation I did \usepackage[draft]{hyperref}, and that seems to work. But that doesn't seem to be the official way. And I don't want to test multiple times if EDAS accepts it or not, because all authors get notified each time I submit a new version. Also, the [draft] option doesn't remove the PDF bookmarks either, which EDAS also doesn't want.

@Ian: I would expect there to be an option like \usepackage[disablelinks]{hyperref} or similar, but I scanned the documentation and didn't find such a thing. — Rabarberski, Apr 25 '12 at 15:22
Did you try \usepackage[options]{nohyperref}? This should be a package that defines everything hyperref does, but does nothing. — egreg, Apr 25 '12 at 15:26
@egreg: good suggestion, but compilation still fails on the \url{http://...} entries in my bibtex file (.bbl): undefined control sequence — Rabarberski, Apr 25 '12 at 15:33
@Rabarberski As Boris says: \hyperref actually loads url, but nohyperref doesn't. :( — egreg, Apr 25 '12 at 15:37
nohypreref does not seem to accept [pdftex,unicode] as options. — sup, Aug 21 '15 at 15:50

score 35 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 25 '12 at 17:02

35

Thanks to @egreg, the recipe is

\usepackage[options]{nohyperref}  % This makes hyperref commands do nothing without errors
\usepackage{url}  % This makes \url work

answered Apr 25 '12 at 17:02

Boris

38,129

5

The url package does not provide the same \url. In particular if your URL contains special characters such as _%#{}, hyperref's \url does require you to escape them with a backslash, while, with url's \url, those characters are not to be escaped. In fact with the url package any \\ in your URLs is treated as a normal character and displayed in the final PDF. – Po' Lazarus Feb 07 '13 at 10:03
2

This does not work with the xr package; external references include text and numbers instead of just the equation number. Also, the pdfauthor and pdftitle options to hyperref are not accepted in nohyperref. – Liam Jul 31 '14 at 15:11

juliohm · Answer 2 · 2014-05-21T00:15:10.837

31

Add the draft option to your \hypersetup:

\hypersetup{draft}

or as you already mentioned:

\usepackage[draft]{hyperref}

edited May 21 '14 at 00:15

answered May 21 '14 at 00:06

juliohm

3,452

2

Dear downvoter, please explain why you've downvoted this answer, otherwise I'll never know what I did wrong. – juliohm May 22 '14 at 14:05
5

FWIW, I didn't down vote, but I suspect the reason for the votes is that the OP mentions exactly this solution in his question, and also that it didn't work for him. – darthbith Aug 07 '14 at 14:59

AlexG · Answer 3 · 2017-04-12T07:57:21.363

24

hyperref itself provides the NoHyper environment:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\begin{NoHyper}
...
\end{NoHyper}
\end{document}

This still creates bookmarks (listed in the "Bookmarks" navigation panel of PDF viewers). If these shall be suppressed too, add option bookmarks=false:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[bookmarks=false]{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\begin{NoHyper}
...
\end{NoHyper}
\end{document}

edited Apr 12 '17 at 07:57

answered Apr 12 '17 at 07:43

AlexG

54,894

1

I think it is sometimes better than nohyperref package. nohyperref is too low-level to have \url, \autoref etc. – Leo Liu Jun 14 '17 at 07:21
Yes, I remember that when I tried using nohyperref, other things went broken. – AlexG Jun 14 '17 at 08:12
2

Or \AtBeginDocument{\NoHyper} for template authors. – Leo Liu Jun 16 '17 at 02:12
While this will leave the bookmarks navigation, all the chapters in that panel seem to start on page 1. – Mr. Wrong Apr 02 '23 at 20:34

score 6 · Answer 4 · edited Oct 03 '14 at 07:48

6

I had the same problem, however using \usepackage[options]{nohyperref} doesn't compile my \autoref links. So I used the \usepackage[draft]{hyperref} that you already mentioned and uploaded to the EDAS website, which seems to have accepted the entry. So using the [draft] option is a viable solution to part of the problem.

edited Oct 03 '14 at 07:48

Guido

30,740

answered Oct 03 '14 at 06:37

codingJitters

61

How to disable links completely using hyperref package?

4 Answers4

Linked