Producing clickable hyperlinks in ipe

Question

I'm starting to use ipe to create slides for a presentation. But LaTeX does not behave the way I am used to. For example, I want to use the hyperref package to have URLs with a different font which are also clickable in the pdf. Therefore I import hyperref in the preamble of my ipe document:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
\renewcommand{\vec}[1]{\mathaccent"017E {#1}}

% settings %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\newcommand{\itemcolor}{KITgreen}
\newcommand{\name}{Author}
\newcommand{\prestitle}{Title}

% my packages
\usepackage{hyperref}

% my commands

Then I try to use the \href or \url command inside an ipe text box:

\textcolor{KITblue}{
Authors: \textit{Title} - arXiv.org preprint, April 2013 \href{http://arxiv.org/abs/555.555}{arxiv.org/abs/555.555}
} 

Now LaTeX compilation fails with:

{/usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}
! pdfTeX error (ext4): link annotations cannot be inside an XForm.
\@EveryShipout@Output ...@Org@Shipout \box \@cclv 

l.356 \end{document}

What could be wrong here?

Answer 1

The documentation of ipe says on page 9 "You cannot use commands that involve a non-linear translation into PDF, such as commands to generate hyperlinks or to include external images.". It also says (p. 24) that the complete tex-file ipetemp.tex can be found in a temporary folder.

Answer 2

An alternative way is the following:

1. create a textbox with your link text

2. Make it a group containing itself

3. Use set link action to set the destination link

See http://ipe.otfried.org/manual/onepage.html#id31 for more details.