PDFMaker: Losing first part of link and REF text

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Hi all —

I’m using Acrobat 9 PDFMaker with Word 2007 on Windows XP.

When I convert certain documents to PDF, hyperlinks and cross-references (Word REF fields) are doing something weird — the actual link in the resulting PDF file comes though OK, but in the text of the hyperlink/field, the fist word disappears. For example: “Training Your Dog” gets turned into “Your Dog”; http://www.zzzsite.com gets turned into http://www.zzzsite.com.

This behavior only manifests in the PDF file, not in the Word source file; forcing an update all fields in Word does not alter the results.

The problem happens consistently for some documents, but not at all for others.
The parent template does not seem to be an issue either.

And the real brain breaker is that of the five systems I have access to (all with the same setup noted above), two of them manifest this behavior consistently (for specific documents only), and the other three do not.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? If you have, any insights you could share would be much appreciated. Or at least an assurance that I am not going insane…

Thank you,
-Arianna

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Do you get the same behavior if you use the Export to PDF function provided in Word 2007 SP2? If not, then I suspect there is an issue with Acrobat 9 PDFMaker.

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Is the text in question formatted as “Hidden” in the Word documents?

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WendellB, you are right; Export to PDF does prevent this from happening. The catch is I need some of the features that are only available with PDFMaker (tagging for 508 being the biggest one), so I am stuck with PDFMaker.

William, the text is not hidden.

Thanks both for the ideas to try — at this point I am open to just about anything.

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That would seem to confirm that the issue is with PDFMaker. One thing you might try is saving the document in a different format – Word 2003 if it is normally saved in 2007 (.docx) format, or 2007 format if it is saved as a .doc file. Another option might be to export it to PDF and then edit it with Acrobat to do the tagging.

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One thing you might try is saving the document in a different format – Word 2003 if it is normally saved in 2007 (.docx) format, or 2007 format if it is saved as a .doc file. Another option might be to export it to PDF and then edit it with Acrobat to do the tagging.

I tried Word 2003 vs. 2007 over the weekend but no joy. But now I’m wondering if Acrobat 8 vs. 9 might be worth checking into.

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I think that PDFMaker is definitely the culprit. I would go with the post-tagging in Acrobat but that does not pick up the alt text that must be in place for the numerous images in the documents– redoing that by hand is not practical for documents this long.

But I like your idea about saving these files as .docx — they are both currently .doc. In fact, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of that on my own.

Off to test the theory…

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Are you using the latest version of Acrobat 9?

The release notes for the version 9.2 update (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/500/cpsid_50026.html), for example, mention problems with PDFMaker that have supposedly been fixed.

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I was running 9.2 when the problem manifested itself; now I’m up to 9.3.2 with no alteration in the affected documents. Oh well…

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Hi Arianna-

I’ve just started using PDF maker in the same configuration as yours, so I’m very interested in learning more about how other people use it.

Have you looked at the Preferences settings for PDF Maker? I know if it’s set to create to the PDF/A standard, links are not created. Maybe you should experiment with the various choices on the “Settings” tab for your issue–.

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Have you looked at the Preferences settings for PDF Maker? I know if it’s set to create to the PDF/A standard, links are not created. Maybe you should experiment with the various choices on the “Settings” tab for your issue–.

Yep, I’ve exercised those pretty heavily. The key things with this issue is that it only happens when tagging is enabled, and it only happens for specific Word files. Most are fine but there are three files that persistently lose part of the link “label”.

As far as I can tell, I’ve eliminated .doc vs. .docx issues and template corruption.

I have discovered one good thing though: Microsoft’s “Save As PDF or XPS” add-in does resolve the problem with the misbehaving documents, and does support the 508 tagging that I am required to use. Of course, it’s not a perfect fix, that would be too easy! (There is a slight-to-moderate degradation in the image quality in files converted with Microsoft’s add-in, even using the Standard aka “higher quality” setting.) But if I have to choose between evils, I can live with that.

Thanks all for your support on this thread…
Arianna

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