(eplain.info)Hyperlink driver nolinks

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5.4.4 Hyperlink driver 'nolinks'
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Select this driver to suppress all hyperlinks in your document.

   Selecting this driver is quite different from not selecting any
driver at all, or from selecting some driver and then turning hyperlinks
off for the entire document with '\hloff' and '\hldestoff' (Note:
Turning hyperlinks on/off).

   The purpose of '\hldestoff' and '\hloff' is to mark (parts) of your
document where hyperlinks should never appear. (Imagine you want to
prevent a cross-referencing macro from generating a link at a certain
spot in your document.)

   If instead you have prepared a document with hyperlinks and just want
to compile a version without them, it is better to select the driver
'nolinks'. This ensures that spacing and page-breaking are the same as
what you were getting with hyperlinks enabled.

   The reason for this is that hyperlinks are produced by the '\special'
primitives or low-level hyperlink commands. Each such command is placed
inside a "whatsit" (an internal TeX object), which may introduce
legitimate breakpoints at places where none would exist without the
whatsits. The macros '\hldestoff' and '\hloff' disable the hyperlink
macros completely, so that no whatsits are produced.

   In contrast, the 'nolinks' driver does not completely disable
hyperlink macros. Instead, it defines them to merely write to the log
file (what gets written is unimportant). This also produces whatsits,
thus imitating the whatsits from the hyperlink commands. (This trick was
borrowed from the LaTeX 'color' package.)

   Another reason for using 'nolinks' is that in horizontal mode
'\hldest' places destinations inside boxes of zero width, height, and
depth. When you say '\hldestoff', '\hldest' will omit both destination
definitions and these boxes. The missing boxes can again cause the
typesetting to be inconsistent with that with destinations enabled. Here
again, the 'nolinks' driver helps by defining '\hldest' to produce the
empty boxes.

   So, if you are planning to produce versions of your PDF document both
with and without hyperlinks, here is the recommended way to enable the
hyperlinks under pdfTeX:

     \ifpdf
       \enablehyperlinks
     \else
       \enablehyperlinks[nolinks]%
     \fi