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albertoc033829
albertoc033829
August 27, 2025
Question

How to extract hyperlink annotations (URLs) from PDF in Appian?

  • August 27, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 0 views

Hi everyone,

I’m working with procurement documents (PDFs) that contain hyperlinks (e.g. links to official tender platforms). When I use the Get PDF Text smart service (from PDF Tools), the visible text comes through, but the embedded hyperlinks (annotations/URI actions) are not returned.

I also tested with AI Skills (Document Extraction), but it seems to behave the same way — as if Appian is only sending the extracted text to the AI model rather than the full PDF object. As a result, the links are lost there as well.

Has anyone found a way in Appian to extract these hidden links directly from PDFs?

  • Is there any existing plug-in or connected system that supports reading hyperlink annotations?

  • Or would the only option be to build a custom plug-in with something like Apache PDFBox?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

    2 replies

    stefanhelzle0001
    stefanhelzle0001
    August 27, 2025

    I think the functions you tried only work with the human visible text, which makes sense for many/most use cases. Yours is very specific and you probably have to use some external service or a custom plugin.

    albertoc033829
    albertoc033829Author
    August 27, 2025

    That’s what I was suspecting as well. Thanks for confirming it!
    I’ve started working on a custom plug-in to handle PDF annotations/URI actions directly (since the standard functions only return visible text), but I wanted to double-check with the community before going too far.

    It’s a bit of a pity that the document itself isn’t passed to the AI Skills — if it were, extracting the hyperlinks would be immediate (I’ve tried with ChatGPT and it returns them right away).

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