Using well-supported CSS techniques, it is possible to create a document where URLs appear when printed, though it does require placing them in the document twice.
On the reader’s side, if you don’t mind monospace and no images, the text web browser Lynx can format a page with all URLs as footnotes: lynx -dump <URL>
Does the CSS make the URLs appear in the middle of text paragraphs, where there was a hyperlink in the online version, or as footnotes or references outside the main text? Nobody really wants the main text to get interrupted by noisy URLs all the time, and on the other hand having URLs written out in the open even in the online version doesn’t matter that much if it’s in the references section at the end of the document.
The Lynx thing probably isn’t good for pleasant reading, but might work for some kind of compromise scheme where you get a document that’s very human-readable and can be used for an OCR data restoration that gets you the text and references back, though not most of the formatting.
CSS allows one to make arbitrary content appear or disappear when a document is printed (given that said content is already in the document). So you can have plain hyperlinks on screen, but numbered footnotes/references in print.
Using well-supported CSS techniques, it is possible to create a document where URLs appear when printed, though it does require placing them in the document twice.
On the reader’s side, if you don’t mind monospace and no images, the text web browser Lynx can format a page with all URLs as footnotes:
lynx -dump <URL>Does the CSS make the URLs appear in the middle of text paragraphs, where there was a hyperlink in the online version, or as footnotes or references outside the main text? Nobody really wants the main text to get interrupted by noisy URLs all the time, and on the other hand having URLs written out in the open even in the online version doesn’t matter that much if it’s in the references section at the end of the document.
The Lynx thing probably isn’t good for pleasant reading, but might work for some kind of compromise scheme where you get a document that’s very human-readable and can be used for an OCR data restoration that gets you the text and references back, though not most of the formatting.
CSS allows one to make arbitrary content appear or disappear when a document is printed (given that said content is already in the document). So you can have plain hyperlinks on screen, but numbered footnotes/references in print.