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Protected Word document - create PDF preserving links

missantarctica5
Registered: Jun 14 2007
Posts: 8
Answered

Hi, I have Adobe Standard 6.0 and Word 2003.

Other departments in my company create word documents and publish them to the intranet, protected from editing. I would like to PDF these documents, preserving the links (TOC, cross references, etc.). I can print the document to Adobe PDF, but the links are lost. When I use "convert to Adobe PDF" I get a message that "Adobe PDFMaker cannot continue because the Document is protected for editing. Please unprotect it before running PDFMaker". I do not want to update or save the Word document. Is there a setting that I am missing, or is what I want to do just impossible?

Thanks for any help!

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 6.0, Windows
daka630
Expert
Registered: Mar 1 2007
Posts: 1420
missantarctica5 wrote:
...Is there a setting that I am missing, or is what I want to do just impossible?
Regarding the message

Quote:
"Adobe PDFMaker cannot continue because the Document is protected for editing. Please unprotect it before running PDFMaker".
You've not missed any settings. As long as the MS Word file(s) are protected you'll not be able to use the PDFMaker.

re: ...impossible
Actually, no; just unprotect the MS Word file(s). You'll be outputing PDF, *not* performing edits or updates (although you'd want to perform a TOC update to ensure links are good to go).
If this is not an option then you'll have to use the link tool to build the links.
Of course you will have to rebuilt each PDF everytime the parent MS Word file is changed and released.

While protected MS Word files provided a feel-good in the sense that you have your documents, with interactive links, out on the network, it is far less robust or functional in comparison to an eLibrary of well-formed, interactive PDF collections having cataloged search indexes available.

Be well...

Be well...

missantarctica5
Registered: Jun 14 2007
Posts: 8
Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, the document control group will not allow us to unprotect the documents. I agree with you; the PDF libraries that we had before were much more functional. The company has implemented a new "solution" using a viewing tool called Brava, so we are having to change all our processes. I thought I could create our own PDF library, but I will have to try something else.