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Why do my hyperlinks keep reverting to the wrong page in my table of contents, when I convert to Acrobat? InDesign Cloud running on Mac OS 26.6.2

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After correcting a page number in the Hyperlinks panel (Edit Hyperlink), then applying the style to something other than [regular font underlined blue link style], the page number reverts to the previous page that text linked to in the Table of Contents.

I’ve now deleted all the hyperlinks and will try replacing them with a new link for each page number.

Frans v.d. GeestCorrect answer

Community Expert

Ouch! This is not the right nor easy way to build a TOC…!
Familiarize yourself with how to use the TOC function in InDesign, then you simply update it with a click when pages shuffle or text changes. It also creates hyperlinks automatically for PDF when you use the build in function and avoids the errors you see.

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elizabethn52808604Author

Known Participant

Thx, I will try that on the next newsletter. These pubs are usually only 15-18 pages long.

Am using the latest update of InDesign for Mac OS.

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elizabethn52808604Author

Known Participant

Thanks for the info.

I built the TOC as plain text and styled it using Character Styles, not the generator you speak of. When page items moved or pages got added, I corrected the page number in Edit Hyperlink from the Hyperlinks panel.

It’s not saving my changes.

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Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @elizabethn52808604,

Thank you for clarifying that your Table of Contents was created manually and sorry to hear that you experience this.

Could you please confirm the exact version of InDesign you're using by navigating to Help > About InDesign? Also, does this issue occur with all manually created hyperlinks or only specific ones?

To help isolate the issue, please try editing one of the affected hyperlinks through Window > Interactive > Hyperlinks > Edit Hyperlink and update its destination. Then, select the hyperlink in the panel, right-click and choose Go To Destination to check whether it navigates to the correct page.

If possible, please share a short screen recording showing the hyperlink destination being corrected and then reverting to the previous page.

Looking forward to hearing back.

Thanks!

Abhishek

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CORCTON34033231

Community Expert

Hi Elizabeth — this is how a generated TOC behaves, and it's why the fix keeps unravelling: the TOC is built from the paragraphs it lists, and Adobe's guidance is to always edit the source content instead of the TOC itself, because TOC updates overwrite manual changes (https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/desktop/indexes-and-references/add-a-table-of-contents/table-of-contents-planning.html). Deleting the hyperlinks and rebuilding them one by one will keep fighting that generator.

What to do instead:

• If an entry points to the wrong page, go to the source: check the paragraph that entry was generated from — is that heading actually on the page you expect, and does the document's page numbering match the folio printed on the page? Fix it there, then use Layout > Update Table of Contents so the entry, its page number and its link are all regenerated together.

• For the Acrobat file, export as Adobe PDF (Interactive): TOC entries are exported as hyperlinks to the paragraphs they list, so there's no need to maintain manual hyperlinks on the TOC page numbers at all.

Hope that saves you some rebuilding!

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