I often like to link to software packages or websites in scientific papers, and prefer URLs in PDFs to be clickable. You can do this quite easily in LaTeX:

Check out my website\footnote{\url{http://www.brechtdeman.com}}.

(This requires the hyperref package.)

However, this has the ugly ‘http://’ or ‘https://’ prefix everywhere in the URLs which is decidedly less neat. You could drop it but come on, that’s just bad practice.

I also thought it would be nice if the relevant part of the text would already be clickable (e.g. ‘We published a browser-based listening test framework1.’)

Sure enough, you can do this too:

Check out \href{http://www.brechtdeman.com}{my website}
\footnote{\href {http://www.brechtdeman.com}{www.brechtdeman.com}}.

Of course, this becomes very long, so I made the following macro and have been using it everywhere since a year or so.

% Make clickable footnote
\newcommand{\hyperfootnote}[1][]{\def\ArgI\hyperfootnoteRelay}
% relay to new command to make extra optional command possible
\newcommand\hyperfootnoteRelay[2][]{\href{#1#2}{\ArgI}\footnote{\href{#1#2}{#2}}}
% the first optional argument is now in \ArgI, the second is in #1

Then use as follows (still requiring the hyperref package):

1. Simple (no arguments)

\hyperfootnote{http://www.mywebsite.com}

This creates a footnote consisting of a clickable URL.

2. Link text (1 argument)

\hyperfootnote[My website]{http://www.mywebsite.com}

This creates a clickable piece of text in the text (‘My website’) plus a footnote consisting of a clickable URL.

3. Link text and invisible prefix (2 arguments)

\hyperfootnote[My website][http://]{www.mywebsite.com}

This creates a clickable piece of text in the text (‘My website’) plus a footnote consisting of a clickable URL without the prefix (in this case ‘http://’). Upon clicking it, however, you are directed to the full link, i.e. ‘http://www.mywebsite.com’.


This ‘minimal working example’ consisting of a LaTeX and a PDF file further illustrates the concept.

You can use the xspace package to add/absorb spaces when necessary, e.g. to avoid a space between the footnote number and a punctuation mark.