Table of Figures Hyperlinks don't convert from Word to PDF

Report · Mar 08, 2019

I created a table of figures below the TOC in a 400-plus Word document, using Word 2016. After converting to PDF, the hyperlink feature disappears but the TOC and TOF are okay otherwise. The TOC retains the hyperlinks but the TOF doesn't. any ideas why?

Report · Mar 13, 2019

Please confirm the version of the Operating System you are using and the version of Acrobat.

I suspect you are using Windows OS.

In the settings to export from MS Word (using the Acrobat tools, not the Microsoft default one) you can select the paragraph/character styles used in your document to be converted to hyperlinks.

Check which styles are used in your document and make sure they are selected to include hyperlink conversion during export

Report · Dec 16, 2020

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the advice, but it doesn't work for me. I'm running Office 365 on the latest WIN10 OS and Acrobat 2017. Setting the Adobe pdf addin to Word as you suggest creates a ton of bookmarks in the bookmark pane, but the hyperlinks in the Table of Figures (TOF) are missing.

The links in the Table of Contents (TOC) elements and TOF elements have the same pattern in referencing the word filename along with a TOC bookmark for each element in both tables. In the Word document, both tables work as designed in navigating back/forth to/from the TOC/TOF to document locations. When I do a Word "save as" to Adobe PDF, the TOC elements get properly processed into internal links and work correctly. The TOF elements, however, remain unchanged and when clicked they attempt to open the Word source file for the pdf on the local computer to find the bookmark within that file.

The links in the TOC are created from heading styles in the Word document. The links in the TOF table are created from the "caption" style. The Word process for adding captions to figures creates a caption in a text box that is placed above or below the figure. The captions being placed in text boxes is the major difference between the heading styles in the TOC (which exports to pdf fine) and the caption style in the TOF (which does not). This is confirmed by placing the caption for a figure directly into a word document (i.e., not in a text box). When that is done, the TOF will have a working link when the Word document is exported using the "save as" Adobe PDF.

Note text boxes are problematic for other Word/Acrobat features.