Automatically avoid broken internal hyperlinks

Question

I am using pdftex and the hyperref package. I have a number of automatically generated \hyperlink{<label>}{<text>}, which point to other automatically generated \hypertarget{<label>}{<text>}.

But since the two are generated independently, I don't know a priori whether a given label exists or not. The default behaviour when hyperlinking to an inexistent target is to put a "Go to page 1" link, which is completely useless for the user.

Is it possible to change that default behaviour to either

• put no link when the link would be broken, or

• point the link to itself?

Answer 1

I added code for this to the ydoc package (beta version only), which is an alternative to ltxdoc/doc. There the macro descriptions are hyperlinked to the place where the macros are defined and vice versa.

To avoid dead links for internal macros which aren't described in the user manual part I remember each one by defining a macro like \defined@<name> when I set the \hypertarget{}. This definitions are also written to the .aux file so that they are available at the beginning of the document. The \hyperlink is then only set if \defined@<name> exist.