Adobe standard XI

[dkiladis]

HI- I have Adobe Acrobat XI and I have a PDF that needs hyperlinks that connect to certain documents.  I can open the documents, but others can't.  What am i doing wrong?

thank you!

[try67]

Do the others have the same files on their computers, at the same relative

location to the main PDF as on yours?

[Pariah Burke · Accepted solution]

As try67​ alluded to, hyperlinks are full paths to the documents. If, for instance, you link to C:\folder\subfolder\My.pdf, then that path is relative to the location of My.pdf on your computer. When someone else loads the original PDF on his or her computer and clicks the same link, Acrobat will go looking for the document at C:\folder\subfolder\My.pdf; not finding it there, nothing will happen.

To solve the problem, you can either put all the PDFs in a universally-accessible location(s) or all in the same folder as the source PDF, the PDF into which you've added hyperlinks.

Option 1: Put them all on a network drive or the Internet and THEN add the hyperlinks in the source PDF. The result will be links like X:\folder\My.pdf or http://mysite.com/xyz123/My.pdf

Option 2: Put all the PDFs--the source PDF and the destination of all hyperlinks--into the same folder and distribute the folder (maybe as a ZIP archive). Create the hyperlinks by pointing to the files in the same folder. The result will be hyperlinks that don't include any network, drive, or folder in the path, merely the file name itself, making it work for everyone who has the source and destination PDFs in the same folder.