Difficult to offer any advice; it seems to me more like you should be contacting Adobe to ask them why you are getting this different behavior from Acrobat Reader (than Acrobat Pro) with the same exact PDF.

Your other option would be to open a Case with Tech Support and provide your XPP data and commands used to produce the PDFs for them to investigate and see whether it looks like an issue with XPP or (more likely) with Adobe.

Thanks Jonathan for your valuable input. I will check with Adobe and may be with SDL if required.

Hi there!

Based on this specific scenario where the data in the division is XML and uses Item Format for formatting, if you remove the :pdfs and :pdfe macros and add the following to the CSS used for pdfua processing:

a[href] { -xpp-pdf-tag: "Link";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation: "type={www} text={attr(href)}";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation-options: "contents={attr(href)} linewidth={1} borderstyle={underline}";
}

Where the tagging for the link in the division looks something like this:

   <a href="">https://www.google.com" rel="noopener" target="_blank">www.google.com</a>

The result is the hover will reflect what is in the "contents" of the -xpp-pdf-annotation-options string, in this case, whatever is in the attr (href). 

The border style defaults to a solid full border/box around the link but other options as noted in the PDF Support in XPP manual (page 8-12 or 122 of the PDF) are solid, beveled, dashed, inset, or underline. It is not possible to remove the border completely with this method.

If no border is desired/required, please enter an XPP Idea using this link,  XPP Ideas and give it an upvote so it will be considered by the product team. 

Depending on what you are using to view the PDF, things may appear differently, for example in some browsers you will see the underline or box border and in others it is invisible but this method will present the user with the link text rather than "Generate Hotspot" text.

So great to see the correct URL displayed. 

UPDATE July 23, 2024

We have found a way to eliminate the border, in this case when the page is white using the annotcolor option as shown here:

a[href] { -xpp-pdf-tag: "Link";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation: "type={www} text={attr(href)}";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation-options: "contents={attr(href)} linewidth={1} borderstyle={underline} annotcolor={white}";
}

If the background or page color is different, the color would need to be change appropriately in the annotcolor option.

This takes care of making the border "invisible" for these purposes.

Fortunately there is a way to get the desired result already, we got there! 

I think there's a better way to "remove" the border, if that's what you need to do.

In the PDF Support in XPP manual for the -xpp-pdf-annotation-options property, this is what it says for the linewidth option:

So, instead of having to worry about whether the annotcolor option setting is going to work with the current background color so that the border is "invisible" and even what borderstyle value to set, I would just try setting linewidth to 0 as in the following:

a[href] { -xpp-pdf-tag: "Link";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation: "type={www} text={attr(href)}";
          -xpp-pdf-annotation-options: "contents={attr(href)} linewidth={0};
}

Note that if you didn't already have the -xpp-pdf-tag property set to "Link" for your PDF/UA output, I don't believe that you also need to add that here in order for the WWW "link" to work properly. That part just happened to be part of the example that was given in the documentation. But you may find that you actually do want that PDF/UA tag on this element, if you didn't already have it.

Aaaaand that is the final piece, thank you Jonathan Dagresta!

This was just tested and it hides the link border. Successful CSS is:

a[href] { -xpp-pdf-tag: "Link"; 
  -xpp-pdf-annotation: "type={www} text={attr(href)}"; 
  -xpp-pdf-annotation-options: "contents={attr(href)} linewidth={0}} ";
}