Beamer: Using href in notes

Question

In my example

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{pgfpages}

%\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen}
\setbeameroption{show notes}
\setbeamertemplate{note page}{\insertnote}

\begin{document}
\frame{\href{http://www.google.com}{test frame}\note{\href{http://www.google.com}{test note}}}
\end{document}

the link behind "test note" only works if I use "show notes", if I switch to "show notes on second screen" then the link is not clickable at all. Any ideas or help?

Answer 1

I think the problem is that show notes on second screen requires pgfpages but pgfpages breaks hyperlinks when it rearranges pages. I was looking for something else and I just found this in the manual (and then had to try to find this question):

A word of warning: using pgfpages will destroy hyperlinks. Actually, the hyperlinks are not destroyed, only they will appear at totally wrong positions on the final output. This is due to a fundamental flaw in the pdf specification: In pdf the bounding rectangle of a hyperlink is given in “absolute page coordinates” and translations or rotations do not affect them. Thus, the transformations applied by pgfpages to put the pages where you want them are (cannot, even) be applied to the coordinates of hyperlinks. It is unlikely that this will change in the foreseeable future.

The reference is page 920 of the tikz/pgf manual.

Since I think the entire notes page is probably placed via a transformation using pgfpages when you ask for notes on the second screen, I am afraid that it looks as if the answer to your question might be that it cannot be done (at the present time and in 'the foreseeable future'). If this is a limitation of the PDF specification itself, as this documentation suggests, you are probably out of luck.

This isn't exactly an answer except in the technical sense that 'Any ideas or help?' might be answered 'No. None.' but I thought that this information might at least save you from pursuing dead ends and allow you to focus on developing an alternative strategy.

Answer 2

@cfr's answer is right to the point. Let me describe a hacky workaround. It works for links which don't contain a line break.

\newcommand{\fixedhref}[2]{\makebox[0pt][l]{\hspace*{\paperwidth}\href{#1}{#2}}\href{#1}{#2}}

Use it as a drop-in replacement to \href. The idea is quite simple: In addition to drawing the link as usual (whose clickable area is in the left pane, \paperwidth to the left of where the label is actually drawn), the link is drawn a second time much farther to the right. Thanks to the bug in the PDF specification, the clickable area of this second like will be at exactly the place the label of the first link is drawn.

An improved solution would remove the spurious clickable areas in the left pane while still applying the \href styling to the label text.