Hyperlinks in CV

[mcm1]

I'm curious as to whether or not anybody is aware how most admissions committees view transcripts. I have a number of links in mine that link to publications, conference reports I wrote, etc, which are useful if they're viewed on a computer but would look weird if it's printed out (seemly random words underlined if printed black&white). So I was curious if anyone has any input as to whether or not it would be better to keep them in or take them out.

[fuzzylogician]

Why would they be random words? If you place your links correctly, you could have the link be the title of the presentation or publication, for example, and then it's perfectly clear what's going on. Or you could not have an underline at all but instead use a different color font to indicate the hyperlink, so when it's printed it's not a problem at all. 

In any event, beyond that I don't think there's much more insight anyone can give you. I assume some people (maybe most, these days) read everything on some electronic screen or other, but some may like to have printed copies to take notes on. The distribution of printers vs non-printers will vary by person/committee/institution and depends on the makeup of a particular committee at a particular point in time. It's down to personal preferences, not much more than that. 

[Eigen]

Are we talking about transcripts or CVs?

If transcripts, then you have no control over how they appear, and shouldn't worry about it. 

If a CV, then you have ultimate control over how hyperlinks appear, and should take @fuzzylogician's advice about formatting them properly. 

I would assume that on every committee, someone will be reading paper and someone digital. 

[TakeruK]

I put hyperlinks on my CV, but only to the DOIs/journal webpage/preprint server address of my papers and conference proceedings. I format them so that the hyperlinks appear no different than regular text, so a person printing out my CV will not know there were hyperlinks at all.

For a person reading an e-copy, the hyperlinks are still coded as such. Therefore, it is up to each person's e-reader software to decide how to display them. On my PDF reader, all links are surrounded by a coloured rectangular box, and if you mouse over it, the cursors changes from a pointer to a hand. Like fuzzy said, I pick the links to be words that make sense, such as the title of the paper, so these would be natural things a reader might point to or try to click on. 

[cowgirlsdontcry]

Just a thought here, but some programs want everything converted to a PDF, so links would not work.

[Eigen]

36 minutes ago, cowgirlsdontcry said:

Just a thought here, but some programs want everything converted to a PDF, so links would not work.

Not sure what you mean here?

Links work fine in a PDF. 

[cowgirlsdontcry]

I just created one to see if it would work. The link worked just fine prior to creation of PDF. When I tried to use the link on the PDF, I got a message that the link was broken. It could be because I print to PDF to create the PDF, but it won't work for me.

[Eigen]

Sounds like you've got something going wrong in compiling the PDF. Are you exporting from Word? If printing to PDF, what "printer" are you using?

[TakeruK]

My CV has always been in PDF and I am able to make the links work. Currently, I create my CV using LaTeX and the "hyperref" package allows PDFTeX to compile PDFs with links that work.

But I have also created PDFs from Word files where I "Save As" PDF or "Export" as PDF. 

I think "print to PDF" might be a problem since the "printer" usually does not care about hyperlink info so it might ignore it. However, nowadays, there are much more sophisticated ways to create PDFs without relying on a printer, which would allow for a lot more cool features (e.g. if you want your PDFs to have bookmarks etc.). If you tell us what software you are using to create the content in the first place, maybe someone knows how to create PDFs natively from that software.

[rising_star]

If you "Save as" PDF in Word, hyperlinks work just fine. I've done this in multiple versions of Word (2010, 2016) as well as OpenOffice type programs with no issues. I post all my assignments as PDFs and many of them have hyperlinks to additional resources. I've never had a problem with the links working, nor have students.

[mcm1]

I actually ended up re-doing the whole thing in LaTex rather than Word, and I have to say it looks much better. It offers very fine-tuned control over href behavior, and I learned basic latex syntax in the process. Thanks for the tip.