How stable is ocgx2 with hyperref

Question

I want to achieve color links which are non-colored in print. The package ocgx2 will achieve this with
documentclass{article}

usepackage{hyperref}
usepackage[ocgcolorlinks]{ocgx2}

begin{document}

url{http://tex.stackexchange.com}

end{document}

Please note that I will only will use linked text (as in the MWE), no linked images, no scaled text etc.
Imagine, I will produce a very important document and pass this to a very important person. So nothing should go wrong.
Stage 1: The VIP uses a recent Acrobat Reader under MS Windows and prints the document on a standard inkjet. What could go wrong?
Stage 2: The VIP uses some recent PDF reader under some recent operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and prints it from there. What could go wrong?
Stage 3: The VIP views the PDF on any device (handheld, phone, PDP-11) and tries to print it. What could go wrong?
For each case I am interested in a reasonable worst case scenario for viewing on screen and printing alike. If there is an easy workaround I would like to know that as well.

AlexG · Accepted Answer

I checked the PDF with Preflight (Acrobat Pro XI) for compatibility with Acrobat 6. It passed without errors.
However, the result is quite different when checking against PDF/A, the PDF standard for long-term archiving, but this might not be important in your case. (The standard was updated several times, the first version didn't allow neither OCGs nor transparency.)
The worst scenario that may happen is that links don't come out as black when printing. Though, this might not even be considered as an error by the vip.
Stage 1 is the safest, as long as AR isn't older than AR-6. Nothing bad to be expected. If opened in Chrome's PDF browser plugin (Stage 3?), links will be printed in black colour (or whatever the default text colour is) as well.
Stage 2: Other PDF viewers than these two may print coloured links. Even those PDF viewers that don't support OCGs at all won't produce catastrophic results.

How stable is ocgx2 with hyperref

One Answer

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question