While testing the PDFs for our first batch of Snow Leopard ebooks, Take Control author Matt Neuburg found an unfortunate bug in Snow Leopard's Preview (version 5.0). The buggy behavior occurs with any Web URL that wraps from one line to the next: if you click the portion of the link in the first line, the URL does not work properly. The "fix" is to click the portion of the link on the second line, which will go to the proper location. The problem is not limited to the Take Control series; in testing, I experienced the problem in PDFs generated from an entirely different source.

The problem does not occur in the versions of Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro that we tested under Snow Leopard, so we think it relates to some new "smarts" in Preview 5.0. It seems that Preview is trying to be helpful by automatically making text that looks like a URL clickable, even if that text is not, in fact, a link, and even if it has a proper link on top of it (as is the case in our ebooks).

We hope Apple will correct this problem quickly, but meanwhile, to follow a two-line URL in any Take Control ebook in Snow Leopard's Preview, be sure to click the lower portion of the URL.

—Posted by Tonya Engst on August 27, 2009