Hyperlink Troubleshooting Tips - Part I

Problem
Hyperlinks are not created when converting to PDF.
 
 
Solution
Make sure that the following settings are turned on prior to creating the PDF:
1) If you use the PDFMaker macro to create PDFs from Office documents, check to make sure that the "Add links to Adobe PDF" is checked under the Settings tab. Also make sure "Convert Cross-References and table of contents links" and "Convert footnote and endnote links" is selected under the Word tab of the PDFMaker macro.
2) In Acrobat 8/9, under Edit --> Preferences --> Convert to PDF category make sure the check box is selected for "Add links to Adobe PDF" for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. This is important if you use the "Create PDF" menu in Acrobat to convert Office documents.
3) Make sure you've installed the latest updates/hotfixes for both Acrobat "and" Office.
4) If your Word bookmarks/hyperlinks do not go to the correct location within your PDF, try re-creating your Word file by copy/paste into a new Word file. Also try re-creating the template associated with the Word file (Normal.dot or Normal.dotm for Word 2007).
5) If you are using Word and plan on moving your files to another location, create relative hypertext links within your file. Click here for more information on the difference between relative and absolute hyperlinks in Word. Also, make sure you're links work correctly in Word (ctrl+click).
6) If you're using Word and you plan on moving your files to another location, turn on "Update links on save" in the Word Options menu. This creates relative hypertext links. Turn this off if you wish to create absolute or fixed hypertext links.
7) If you're using Word and want to create a fixed base URL for all your hyperlinks, set a hyperlink base in the Word Document Properties menu.
8) A corrupt Word Normal.dot may cause problems with hyperlinks created using the PDFMaker macro. Try renaming the Normal.dot file so that a new one is generated automatically. For more detail on renamng the Normal.dot check out the following technical note.
9) Running multiple versions of Acrobat (i.e., Acrobat 8 and Acrobat 9) can cause conflicts with the PDFMaker macro, which may cause hyperlink creation issues.
 
Known Issues:
1) Table of Content hyperlinks are not created in PDF if "Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers" is unchecked in Word in Acrobat 9.
If the "Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers" option is OFF for the table of contents when converting a Word document to PDF, then no hyperlinks are created in the PDF. To work around this issue, enable the "Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers' option".
2) On the Macintosh platform, hyperlinks from MSWord are not converted due to differences in Word on OS X compared to Windows.
3) Hyperlinks in Word 2000, XP, or 2003 Headers and Footers don't convert in Acrobat 5 and 6. You'll need to manually re-create the hyperlinks in Acrobat 6 or later.
4) Hyperlinks do not appear in a PDF document created from PowerPoint (Acrobat 6.0). You'll need move the hyperlinked object to the top layer of your presentation in PowerPoint, and then recreate your PDF. For more information visit the following url: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=319944
5) In order for hyperlinks to be clickable in a PDF created using PDFMaker in Microsoft Access, the link has to be fully qualified in the Access hyperlink cell. For example, a link to a web page must be written as http://www.adobe.com and a link to a file needs to be written as c:\temp\file.doc.
6) Acrobat 7 closes when making bookmarks or links on Mac OS. You may need to disable the TablePicker plugin in Acrobat. Close Acrobat, Ctrl click on the Acrobat application icon, choose Get Info and select plugins, and uncheck the TablePicker.acroplugin.