From the course: InDesign Secrets

252 Clean out old hyperlinks and hyperlink destinations - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

252 Clean out old hyperlinks and hyperlink destinations

- [Voiceover] If you're like me, you often start a new document by basing it on an older one. It's just easier than starting with a blank slate, right? But, you may not realize, that when you do that, stuff from the previous document that you might not expect comes along for the ride. A perfect example of this is hyperlinks. For example, this is an article from In Design Magazine. When we publish In Design Magazine each month, we typically open an old article and then clear out all the text and graphics and then flow in the new stuff. Then, we start formatting it and applying hyperlinks and stuff like that. I'll double click on this text frame and then select these words and now I want to apply a hyperlink to it. To do that, I'll go to the Window menu, choose Interactive and then choose Hyperlinks. Here inside my hyperlinks panel, you can see that I have about five hyperlinks already created. I'm going to create a new one by clicking the New Hyperlink button at the bottom of the panel. Now, I know that the web address that I'm looking for has already been used once in my document and most links are what's called "Shared Hyperlink Destinations". Shared just means you can use them over again easily. All you need to do is click on this little pop up menu here and wow. Where did all these links come from? There are like 50 links in here and when I look closely, I notice that these links are from articles that we did months ago. Yeah, that's right, shared hyperlinks don't disappear when you clean out all the old stuff. Even if you delete all of the previous hyperlinks. So, they tend to pile up in these huge, long lists which isn't technically a problem but it does make you less and less efficient because it's harder to find links that you need. So, what do you do? Well, there are two ways to clean out the cruft here. First, I'm going to go ahead and click Cancel and I'm going to look inside the hyperlinks panel menu. I can see here that there's a feature, Delete Unused Destinations. This is the easiest way to get rid of all the garbage. But, let me show you one other way first because a lot of people don't know that this is here. I will choose instead Hyperlink Destination Options. Inside the Hyperlink Destination Options dialog box, I can see a list of all of those same shared hyperlinks. Now, inside this dialog box, there's a Delete Unused button and that does the exact same thing as that menu item. It'll delete all of the ones that are not used in this document. But, sometimes you find you want to delete some and not others. In that case, all you need to do is select a hyperlink in this pop up menu here and then click the Delete button. I'll go ahead and select a few more. Okay, this is going to take too long so I'm going to go ahead and click the button to delete all the unused hyperlinks. Then, I see this scary warning about how even links in other documents might stop working but most people don't share hyperlinks from one document to another. In fact, I almost never have one file linked to a shared hyperlink in another file. I've just seen too many problems with that in-design crashing. I don't recommend cross-file linking but that's a tip for another day. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and say fine, click Okay and now look at this. Only a few of the destinations remain. I'll click Okay and now I'm going to go ahead and create my new hyperlink by clicking the Hyperlink button and those same hyperlink destinations show up here. So, that's good. So, like I said, you don't have to clean out all your old garbage from one document to the next but pretty soon if you don't, it's going to get in your way.

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