Friday 20 February 2009

How to detect the presence of links within a PDF file - linux

This is again somehow related to the conference organisation tasks in which I'm sometimes involved. IEEE does not accept for inclusion in IEEEXplore PDF files that contain links. Therefore, it's useful to have a way to check quickly if the bunch of submitted camera-ready is compliant before sending them over to IEEE.

If you have all your PDFs in a certain directory, from there you simply perform a:
egrep -l "/Link" *.pdf


All the non-compliant filenames will pop out.