Text anchors hyperlinks not linking to another document after PDF export

I have this same need. We have a separate book file for each chapter and need to be able to hyperlink between chapters and add hyperlinks to the overall combined PDF table of contents.

We need each chapter to be its own book file because we are continuously adding new sections to each chapter. Each section is its own INDD. Each chapter has its own frontmatter with a table of contents and list of exhibits for that chapter. We export each chapter to a separate PDF and then combine them all together using Acrobat. We then manually add links to the title page of each chapter. This is an incredibly long an arduous task because there are 15 chapters, each with a title page containing links to each of the 14 other title pages. Plus there is an overall TOC for the collection, resulting in a total of 225 hyperlinks that must be individually created in the compiled document each time it is recompiled (which is necessary after each new section is added).

Having a way to set up the hyperlinks in InDesign, pointing to text anchors created in InDesign, would save us SO MUCH time by allowing us to only need to set up the links once.

Did you make document2 a file attachment to document1? It will probably work within Acrobat, but other PDF readers won't generally support such hyperlinks.

Put both document together in a INDB book file.