Answered
Is there an easy way to make hyperlinks created in Acrobat appear in the ubiquitous blue underlined text?
I was having difficulty getting links in a Word document to open correctly, but I resolved this issue by creating the links directly in Acrobat. When I add a link in Acrobat, however, the only way I have found to make it visible is to select the ugly "visible rectangle" option.
As a work-around, I could manually underline the text and then change the color (either in Word or in Acrobat with the touch-up text tool), but this will be very time consuming given the number of links. Is there no easier way to get this result?
The "link" in a PDF is not a 'shrink wrapped' part of the associated text content in the PDF page content.
Rather, it is a defined 'box', in a different 'layer' of the PDF that is connected, if you will, to the underlying PDF page content (typically some text).
So, if you want a link in PDF the 'box' is what you must have.
As you note, doing manual edits, beyond just a few, is tedious and has to be done with each new output to PDF.
The long term solution (easy way) lies in resolution of the MS Word issue(s) that may exist.
Typical installs of MS Word & Acrobat (which provides the Adobe PDFMaker) results in Word hypertext (correctly used/configured) be blue & underlined in the Word file. This would then be processed by PDFMaker (configured to process links), feed to a Distiller job option for processing by Distiller (installed with Acrobat) which outputs the PDF.
Keep in mind that there are is a defined compatibility 'band' between Adobe PDFMaker and MS Word.
It may be worth a check at the link below to confirm compatibility between your in use version of MS Word and Acrobat 9's PDFMaker.
[url]http://blogs.adobe.com/pdfitmatters/2008/12/version_compatibility_of_acrob.php[/url]
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