Save as PDF causes artifacts

[STL Orca]

Hey gang,

Whenever I save a Word 2016 doc to PDF, I get small text blocks in front of bookmarked text. It looks like a period at the front of the caption or heading, but it's a 3-5 character string in 1-point font. I've attached a screen cap to show what I mean. See the dot at the start of the captions? That's what I mean. It doesn't appear when I print to PDF, only Save As. Wat do?

I'm using Acrobat 2017 and Word 2016 on a Windows 10 laptop.

[gary_sc]

Hi STL Orca,

Exactly HOW are you creating these PDFs? Are you using the Acrobat Ribbon or "Save as PDF," or Save as Adobe PDF?"

[STL Orca]

I'm using the Acrobat Ribbon "Create PDF" because I need to carry over the clickable hyperlinks in the source document.

[Red Ink Writes]

I am having the same problem when converting a Word 365 doc using Acrobat DC - I get artifacts that look like little boxes and periods and have to manually remove them from the PDF.  I was wondering if it is related to Word online. It's very irritating and time consuming to get rid of the artifacts by manually editing the PDF.