Theses, Books, Title pages ⇒ colouring hyperref links

[andyxl]

The hyperref set up in structure.tex has colorlinks=false. Why? When I link to a URL it then just appears in plain text so a reader will not know its a link. I can make my own adjustment to structure.tex, or colour the link-text itself, but am I missing something?

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome, you can change the files to your needs. Many people don't want to use colored links, as they will be printed in color as well. Using the standard setup of hyperref, links will get a red border, which is pretty ugly reading on the screen. But you definitely know that there is a clickable link. May people don't know it, but those borders aren't printed, so this is the perfect setup.
You can even modify the appearence of those borders.

[andyxl]

Wow, quick reply. I do have a hyperref set up cloned from elsewhere that just colours the links blue, without border, but I wanted to understand why the template does it the way it does. Seems the answer is just "otherwise looks ugly when printed". Fair enough.

The other thing that is a slight shame is that I was trying to keep structure.tex as the pristine original, and adding various newcommands of my own in main.tex, just for clarity. But I can't put a new hyperref definition in main.tex without it causing a clash. So be it.

[Johannes_B]

You can set your own stuff after inputting structure.tex via \hypersetup{pdfauthor=YourName}.

There are many things in structure.tex that you might need to change, page format, language, the name and title of the document, the inputencoding you are working with ...
Templates are a difficult thing ...

As to why the author of the template decided to go with non-colored links, i don't know. A template should be an example for you, feel free to change it to your needs.

[Vel]

I think links aren't colored by default for the reason Johannes said, they would show up as colored if printed.

It's impossible to make a template that will be perfect for everyone and some of the more complicated templates, such as this one, definitely require some work to tailor them to how you want the document to look. The template is essentially a starting point which you should modify to suit your needs.

Cheers,
Vel