Customizing Tooltips in Adobe Acrobat Pro

Hi @mary_n_fingerlakes,

Great question. By default, Acrobat/Reader shows the link destination (URL or file path) as the tooltip when you hover over a link. Unfortunately, Acrobat Pro doesn’t provide a direct option to change that text to something more user-friendly.

A couple of things you can try:

• Form fields with tooltips: Instead of a standard link annotation, you can create a button form field over the graphic or text, set its action to open the file/URL, and then use the Tooltip property in the field’s settings. That way, the tooltip text is whatever you choose.

• FrameMaker: The custom tooltips you created there won’t survive the PDF export, since FrameMaker exports them as link annotations, which Acrobat translates into URL tooltips only. To have user-defined tooltips, you’d need to post-process the PDF in Acrobat by replacing those links with form buttons as described above.

• Scripting (advanced): With JavaScript in Acrobat, you can sometimes simulate richer hover text or messages, but this is more involved and not always reader-friendly.

So, the short answer:

• Tooltips for links = always show the destination.

• Tooltips you can fully customize = only available on form fields (like buttons).

If your use case is primarily for navigation within a course document, replacing the hotspots with button fields is the most reliable way to get meaningful tooltips.