A few weeks ago I was ranting at how Pages' PDF export wouldn't respect hyperlinks. After some research, I found there wasn't really a good solution, and I considered finding another way to produce some of my documents. Another problem was that Pages' exported PDFs are absolutely gigantic (1MB for 2 pages in one example I tried!).

Yesterday I had a brainwave. I got my example document, and instead of using Pages' export tool, I printed to Adobe Acrobat 7 Distiller. Et voila, my PDF was 88KB instead of 1MB. Still no hyperlinks, of course, as that's a failing of Pages, not PDF. The solution is to open the PDF in Acrobat and go through selecting the links (they're still marked and colored in) and recreating them using Acrobat's "Create Link" option on the context menu. It's a pain, but it results in a great, fully working PDF. My example came out to 97KB in the end, and for two beautiful Pages created pages (with images), that's pretty respectable.

So, it's no silver bullet, but if you document has less than a hundred links, it's viable if you want to keep using Pages.

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