Inspiring

Question

Links to text anchors look OK in InDesign but don't work in PDF

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 9, 2024
4 replies
1084 views

I'm working with an InDesign document containing links to text anchors within the same document. The links look fine in the InDesign Hyperlinks panel, with correct sources connecting to correct destinations. When exported to EPUB, the links translated into HTML all work fine. But when exported to PDF, they almost all fail, even though Acrobat seems to recognize them as legitimate links.

A colleague and I have been tying ourselves in knots over this for a week. We are both experienced InDesign users whose livelihoods depend on working links!

Bug

D

dawn_3224

Participant

Are you using a Table of Comments (TOC)? If so, I was able to solve this problem by creating Character styles that are specific to the TOC. I would have to go back to my old project to be more specific--it's not very intuitive.

Jeremy bowmangraphicsAuthor

Inspiring

My problem is with custom-made endnotes. (I'm not using InDesign's native endnotes because they don't export to EPUB). I have numbers in the text (like footnote markers) that link to paragraphs at the end of the (smallish) book. These paragraphs are not "numbered" in the technical sense, but start with actual text numbers. These numbers should then link back to the numbers in the text. Everything works fine if these paragraphs have the [Basic Paragraph] style, but fail to link back when any genuine paragraph style is applied.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

Did you patch up to 20.4 yet?

Mike Witherell

Jeremy bowmangraphicsAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, I'm using the latest version of everything, and the failure occurs in both Windows (×64) and Mac.

N

nineyellowenglish

Participant

I'm having the same issue in Sonoma on my Mac Studio and on my Macbook Pro. I know this was a problem in the past, but it seems to be rearing its head again. I've tried all of the fixes from past posts.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

@nineyellowenglish in this thread, are you referring to the links in your table of contents (as per your question here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/text-anchors-in-indesign-book-file-going-to-wrong-pages/td-p/14828682), or are these elsewhere in the file?

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

N

nineyellowenglish

Participant

I think my mistake was not creating a formal TOC--just a list of contents--I'll give that a try.

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

What version of ID? What OS?
What settings are you using when exporting to pdf?
What software app are you using to view the resulting pdf?

Mike Witherell

Jeremy bowmangraphicsAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Mike — thanks for the reply.

I'm always careful to be sure that the "Bookmarks" and "Hyperlinks" check boxes are checked in the "Include" section of the PDF export settings.

I'm using InDesign 19.4 × 64 on Windows 11 Home Version 23 H2. I've also tried the export using both InDesign 19.4 and 19.1 on a Mac mini (Late 2014) running OS Monterey 12.7.4. No luck!

However, overnight I think I might have stumbled upon the source of the problem. I'll need to do further testing today, but if I'm right, I'll post details to the forum. I know that other InDesign users often run into problems with hyperlinks to text anchors.

Thanks again! — Jeremy

Jeremy bowmangraphicsAuthor

Inspiring

I should have added that I've tried several PDF reading applications: Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, Firefox, etc. on both platforms.

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