Google Docs – How to Make Links Clickable in Comments

google docs

In markdown you can make a link clickable using a certain syntax (you have GUI options that automated that or you can follow the syntax).

This is great as it hides the ugliness of long urls behind a user friendly name.

My question is: how can we do this in Google Docs comments? If that's not possible, is there a way to provide a relative link in Google Docs to the header (as opposed to showing the whole link)?

i.e.

Best Answer

Short answer

Insert a full URL instead of just the fragment, like #heading=h.kue93nkjalic

Explanation

Google Comments automatically convert inserted full URL to links but it doesn't do the same for anchors. Google Comments use the same formatting than Google+ posts.

*bold*
_italic_
-strikethrough-
@name or +name to mention an user

There is no formatting option for URLs, so is you would like to avoid long URLs you should use a URL shortener.

References

Related Solutions

Google-docs – How to make an en dash in Google Docs

In the Special characters dialog, you can type in dash in the search box and one of those is an en dash.

If you are using Windows, you can use the numeric keypad to enter an Alt code.
(For en dash: Alt+0150)

Alternatively, you can copy and paste one in.

From Google Docs help:

Insert special characters

You can add special characters into your documents and presentations, such as arrows, shapes, or accent marks.

Open your document or presentation.

Click the Insert menu.

Select Special characters. You can use the drop-down menus to explore categories of characters, or, if you know the Unicode value for the character you’re looking for, you can enter it into the "Hex input" text field.

After selecting a character, click the Insert button to add it to your document.

Google Docs – How to Make Hundreds of URLs Clickable

I did some research on using Google Apps Scripts and I came up with this script that works for my needs. I hope it's useful for someone else too.

function onOpen() {
  DocumentApp.getUi().createAddonMenu()
    .addItem('Make URLs Clickable', 'makeUrlsClickable')
    .addToUi();
}

function makeUrlsClickable() {
  var urlRegex = 'http[s]?:\/\/[^ ]+';
  var body = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument().getBody();
  var urlElement = body.findText(urlRegex);  

  while (urlElement != null) {    
    var urlText = urlElement.getElement().asText();

    var startOffset = urlElement.getStartOffset();
    var endOffset = urlElement.getEndOffsetInclusive();

    urlText.setLinkUrl(startOffset, endOffset, getOnlyUrl(urlText.getText()));

    urlElement = body.findText(urlRegex, urlElement);
  }
}

function getOnlyUrl(text) {
  var startOffset = text.indexOf('http');
  var endOffset = text.indexOf(' ', startOffset);

  if (endOffset === -1) {
    endOffset = text.length;
  }

  return text.substring(startOffset, endOffset);
}