UPDATE -- 2016


Q

Are there any guidelines/system requirements for the client PC for browsing the Doc Archive Web Interface? One of our customers is trying to use Chrome and they're not getting any hyperlinks to show or work in documents being viewed. When using IE, they work. However, they can't use Internet Explorer as their default since some of their other webpages don't work in it. So I wanted to check to see if there are any recommendations/requirements to guarantee functionality of the hyperlinks. This customer is on Unform 9.


A

Hyperlinks used by UnForm require support of javascript URL's, which from what we can tell, only the Acrobat plugin supports. That used to be available in all browsers. Unfortunately, Chrome has stopped supporting the Acrobat plugin, so hyperlinks simply don't work there.  This is becoming a more pervasive issue. Internal PDF engines do not appear to support this type of link in any of the newer browsers. For now, if those links are absolutely required, the only solution is to use IE with the Acrobat plugin.  Firefox may still support the Acrobat plugin, but is planning to drop it.


In 2017, we released the Chrome Web Extension, in which we embed a customized version of the pdf.js PDF viewer.  This supports the UnForm hyperlinks, and it is available to any desktop Chrome user.


In 2018, with the upcoming UnForm 10 release, we are embedding pdf.js in the UnForm product itself, adding support for these hyperlinks in all modern browsers, both desktop and mobile.


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(Old Answer).. Pre-2016


Some UnFom rule files use a PDF feature called annotations in order to provide hyperlinks on PDF documents.  This feature is commonly used to link a document ID printed in one document to the related document.  While this is a standard feature of PDF, it is not supported by all PDF viewing engines.  The most common one of these is the Chrome PDF Plugin.


If you would like hyperlink support in Chrome, you need to use a different plugin for PDF files.  This is easy to do, as long as you have Acrobat Reader installed.


Enter the address chrome://plugins, and Chrome will display the plugin configuration page.  Disable the Chome PDF Plugin, and enable the Acrobat Reader plugin.