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DaveRado
Known Participant
August 17, 2025
Question

Images displaying file path as tooltip when I use the Acrobat PDFMaker Office Com Addin

  • August 17, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 334 views

I'm using Acrobat Pro 2020 and Word for Windows 2007.

Starting quite recently, whenever I create a PDF using the Acrobat PDFMaker Office Com Addin, all the images in the resulting PDF display the file path as a Tooltip when I hover over them. This is ridiculous because the file paths are on my local drive, which no one I send the PDFs to has access to. But I can't see anywhere in the Addin's Preferences settings that enables one to turn this awful behaviour off. (I don't even understand how the PDFMaker knows what the images' file paths are,  as I can't see them in Word, only in Acrobat).

This definitely didn't happen with PDFs I created using the Acrobat PDFMaker Addin in the past - but I'm not sure when the behaviour changed.

 

My short term workaround is to use the PDF printer driver to create PDFs from Word documents, instead of using the the Acrobat PDFMaker Addin - but this is very unsatisfactory.

How can I turn this behaviour off?

Many thanks for your help.


Dave

1 reply

creative explorer
Community Expert
creative explorerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 19, 2025

@DaveRado When you convert a Word document to a PDF using the Acrobat PDFMaker, the add-in automatically creates a tooltip from the image's source file path. This happens because the PDFMaker is designed to meet accessibility standards, and in some cases, it interprets the file path as the best available "alt text" for the image. The behavior change you noticed likely occurred due to an update to Acrobat Pro 2020 or the PDFMaker add-in itself, which now prioritizes these accessibility tags. 

I don't think but, you could check the Preferences setting in the PDFMaker preferences to disable this.  I don't use Acrobat Pro 2020 or Word for Windows 2007. 

m
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DaveRadoAuthor
Known Participant
August 22, 2025

Hi @creative explorer 

  1.  Tooltips are not the same thing as Alt text. Tooltips (i.e. the image Title, not the Alt text) display when you hover over a graphic - and they have nothing to do with accessibility.

    Alt text only displays if one has the display of graphics turned off. 

    So displaying a tooltip while hovering over a graphic that is visible has nothing to do with accessibility standards.
     
  2. Displaying a path that no one has access to (other than the author) is the exact opposite of accessibility. It just confuses people and clutters the UI.

  3.  I can't see any Preference setting in the PDFMaker preferences to disable this. Do you - or does anyone else - have access to any version of PDFMaker? If so - and if you can see a way of turning the awful behaviour off - then I'm sure that method would work in my version too. Please could you or someone let me know if this is possible?

    Thanks

Dave

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DaveRadoAuthor
Known Participant
August 25, 2025

Can anybody help?

 

Does anyone who works for Adobe read this forum?

 

Would hugely appreciate some help with this issue.

 

Many thanks

 

Dave

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