The Judicial Branch advises filers to refrain from using hyperlinks unless required to do so by the court.
The Judicial Branch advises filers to refrain from using hyperlinks in the documents they submit for security reasons and the fact that one of the problems with hyperlinks is that the web page you are linking to can be deleted or modified in the future.
For cases where hyperlinks are required by the court:
When a document with active links is displayed, clicking a link will normally take the user to the referenced document or site. Two notable exceptions are described below.
Masked Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are commonly “masked,” meaning that the full address of the referenced file is not written out; for example, clicking the word Brief may open a brief stored in the system or elsewhere. An “unmasked” hyperlink has the full address visible to the user, such as ”https://www.jud.ct.gov/external/super/E-Services/efile/PDFA-Sample-Brief-Page.htm".
Masked hyperlinks may or may not work in a PDF/A document, depending on how the PDF/A document was created. Currently, masked hyperlinks are preserved in PDF/A documents produced by the “Save As” method in Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010; the “PDFMaker” method in Microsoft Word 2007; and OpenOffice 2.4 (“PDF Export”). With other production methods, such as WordPerfect, the PDF/A document includes underlined words that appear to be links, but clicking them has no effect. To avoid this potential problem, filers may want to use unmasked links in their documents. An unmasked link would also be helpful to anyone viewing a printed copy of the document who needs to see a referenced item.
Adobe’s PDF/A View Mode
If version 9 of Adobe Reader or Acrobat is being used for display, links will not work in “PDF/A View Mode” (the default mode). A user who wants to use the hyperlinks must disable “PDF/A View Mode”, as shown below. According to Adobe, disabling PDF/A View Mode will not be necessary when using Version 10 (and possibly with a patch to Version 9) of the Adobe products; hyperlinks will be active in PDF/A View Mode.
From the Edit menu, select “Preferences” and click the “Documents” category; select “Never” in the PDF/A View Mode drop-down list:
