Why are hyperlinks lost when printing a PDF from Mac Word?

Question

I have a user who is trying to convert Mac Word documents to PDFs and he's saying that the hyperlinks are being stripped. I have another user whose Mac Word has an Adobe menu option in the Word menubar. From there, when she prints to a PDF, the hyperlinks are preserved. Presumably, this problem can be fixed by getting this Acrobat menu into Word. However, we can't seem to do this. We tried to add the Acrobat addin and ended up adding a Document Cloud icon to the Word ribbon, but this seems to require being online to do any conversions to PDFs.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Answer

The document cloud icon links to Adobe's online PDF-generating service. It's your option to use it, but we don't recommend it.

Adobe does not have a plug-in on the Mac to export PDFs from Word/Mac, like the PDF Maker Office/Windows.

"Printing" to a PDF virtual printer will always kill any interactive settings like hyperlinks. You're printing, not exporting the file. Big difference.

So you're left with only one option on Word/Mac: use Microsoft's internal PDF conversion utility:

File / Save As and select PDF from the file type.
Look for the various options to set, such as accessibility tags and hyperlinks.
Export the PDF.

Hope this helps.

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