Document Management

uggiewan,

Nothing fancy here but...

In MS Word, create a file (let us say it is named "toc.doc").
Make an entry for each of the target files.
This input could be obtained programmatically or performed manually.
Use MS Word's hyperlink tool to set a link from each entry to the appropriate target PDF.
Using the Button tool, create a button having the action Open File. The file to open would be "toc.doc".
Add the button to the each of the target buttons.

Much of the setup could involve some measure of automation. Look through the Javascript section of the forum, acrobatusers.com Tutorial and Javascript Corner for a wealth of "how-to" in this regard.

An alternative could be some type of content management application to house the file collection.

Be well...

Thanks for the prompt reply. Will the TOC remain an MS Word document with hyperlinks to the pdf files?

uggiewan,

You could leave "toc.doc" as an MS Word file. Or, you could convert it to a PDF file. Whatever works best for you/your end users.

MS Word hyperlinks can carry through into the output PDF created from the Word file.
For this, you must use the Acrobat PDFMaker. In Word, click on the command menu entry "Adobe PDF".
Click on Change Conversion Settings.
In the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog, be sure that "Add Links to Adobe PDF" is selected/checked.

Note that the target file of a Word hyperlink has some given file extension. When using Word this is often another Word file (*.doc). Whatever the target file's file extension is, when the hyperlink is made, that is what will be present in the link found in the output PDF.

If the target *.doc files are to be converted to PDF then the initial *.doc extension will have to be changed to *.pdf once the Word hyperlink is made. Then do the conversion.
(I suspect that someone knowledgeable in VB or .NET could knock out something that would let you change *.doc to *.pdf in one shot once the "toc.doc" was built.)

If the target files are already PDF then the hyperlink in the "toc" Word file will reflect *.pdf as the file extension.

Be well...

Thanks for the help. You've given me enough information to get started and probably complete my project. Love this fourm!