Pandoc conversion to PDF not providing colored hyptertext links

Question

Consider the following snippet of a PDF generated from pandoc by way of latex.

Were you able to identify the hypertext links in there? Neither was I... It turns out that the second Kaplan Meier has a fully functional link to an external site. But how do we divine that?

Note that the following option is already in place in the pandoc preamble - without which the hyperlink would not work at all:

link-citations: true

Short of a "real" solution I'll need to hack something to make hints for the links - possibly via font manipulations.

Phototopography

Answer 1

If you use a recent version of Pandoc (latest is v2.7.3), just add (for example) these to the commandline:

-V colorlinks=true \
-V linkcolor=blue \
-V urlcolor=red \
-V toccolor=gray

No need to fiddle with the preamble!

You can investigate the built-in LaTeX template shipping with your own Pandoc by this command:

pandoc -D latex | less

Then search for link, url, color etc. to see which variables are pre-defined there. Or:

pandoc -D latex | grep --color -E '(links|color|url|file)'

will give you an idea what other "links" you may want to manipulate.

Martynne

Nice! links were never happy being red anyways (as in the defaults that can be seen in my answer below) .. well at least not until they were given a little attention/love . This is a nice complement to my answer - though I'll prefer adding to the preamble or to a pandoc template – Phototopography

As for the list of colors without scratching deeper under the surface, choose from CSS/Properties/color/keywords - W3C Wiki. I find blue too striking and opt for teal instead. – Hilariohilarious

this has lot of upvotes so I assume it works but it did not for me. I am converting from markdown. anyone else run into this? – Aixenprovence

@morpheus: You did not specify which specific steps of the answer you followed, and what were the exact results of these so I assume you did not follow them. – Martynne

Sorry if I was not clear. I added all the -V flags as the answer suggests. I did not do anything with the preamble as the answer suggests. SO I have a markdown file with no pandoc preamble. I run pandoc on it and use all the flags given. I use the xelatex pdf-engine. There is no error. A pdf is generated but the hyperlinks are not red or any other color for that matter. They just appear as normal text. They do work in the sense that I can click on them. lmk if anything else you need. – Aixenprovence

@morpheus: So you checked your Pandoc version? Which is it? You also checked the LaTeX template your Pandoc uses for "url|color|file|links" occurences? – Martynne

this has to do with the version of pandoc I am using - 2.19. I asked in the mailing list and they helped me. Its a bug in that version fixed in next release. – Aixenprovence

dude, the version of pandoc i am using is more recent than the version mentioned in your answer (2.7.3). hard to believe how vain some people can be. – Aixenprovence

@morpheus: Sorry, I misread the version informaiton you gave as "2.1.9". My fault! – Martynne

In case it helps - am on pandoc 3.1.11.1 on Windows, and this solution also did not work. What did work, was adding -f autolink_bare_uris see #70835961 – Couplet

Answer 2

You can also add to the meta-data colorlinks: true.

---
colorlinks: true
---

[Test](https://mcmap.net/q/400800/-pandoc-conversion-to-pdf-not-providing-colored-hyptertext-links)

gives:

Initiation

where do you add this? In the md file? – Sinkhole

@Sinkhole Yes, in the YAML header – Hau

This is documented here – Hau

Answer 3

Found an answer on tex site that covers this: add the following to the preamble https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/319463/45938:

 - \hypersetup{colorlinks=true}

Now I see there were actually two links.

Phototopography