Hyperlinks with PDFBox-Layout
One thing that made HTML so successful is the hyperlink. Keywords are marked up, and just by clicking on them, you are redirected to the refrerenced position in the document, or even to some totally different document. So it makes perfect sense to use hyperlinks in PDF documents also. Whether you are linking the entries of a TOC to the corresponding chapter, or a piece of information to a corresponding URL in wikipedia. Linking text enriches the content, and makes it more usable. Luckily PDF (and PDFBox ) supports hyperlinks, so why not use it? Because it's a pain. The PDF standard has no notion of marked up text, but the more general and abstract idea of annotated areas: You can describe some area in the document by coordinates, and add some metadata telling the PDF reader what to do with that area. That's quite powerful. You can do highlighting and all kinds of actions with that, and totally independant of the content, just by describing an area. And that's also the ca...