Word to Acrobat adds hidden, broken links to random parts of text.

[bpeat]

Today I ran into the weirdest glitch I've ever seen. Exporting from Word 2020 (OFFice 365) (windows or mac) added a broken link to random text. It used bits of text and links from around it, so it was like mailto:textfromabovelinkfrombelowrandomsymbols

Nothing I did would remove those links. They weren't tagged as links in Acrobat and only appeared if you hovered your mouse over the text in the PDF. The hand was white, unlike when you hover a real link in acrobat which shows some lines inside the hand.

I pulled just the page in question into Illustrator, removed all the clipping masks and resaved as a PDF. Same issue still. Then I converted the text to paths and saved as a PDF. Here's where it gets weird...Acrobat decided to OCR the text AND IT PUT THE BROKEN LINKS BACK IN. How is this possible?

In the end, I had to bring in that section of the page as paths, and turn off the ocr. Only then did the page work correctly without the broken links.

To me this seems like a glitch in Acrobat. The document opened in Apple Preview just fine, no weird, hidden links anywhere.

I can't attach the document here, because it's an internal company manual, but I'd love if someone from Adobe could contact me about this as I wasted hours today figuring out a way around it that wasn't really a great solution in the end.

[try67]

Does it still happen if you go to Acrobat - Preferences - General and untick "Create links from URLs"?

[bpeat]

That does fix it, but is this something anyone reading it would also need to uncheck? It still seems REALLY strange as it's just text, like a few words and a phone number, and the link is a jumbled mess of mailto and other bits from before and after the text. I ask because the reason we even noticed this is the client told us about the links, and they're using Adobe Reader (which I'm going to install now so I can test it).

[bpeat]

I unchecked that box in Acrobat Pro, resaved and opened in Acrobat Reader and the links are still there. In the end my earlier solution worked, but it's not a great solution and doesn't really fix the problem. If the end client has to adjust settings in THEIR app, that's not going to work. I'm still mystified at why it's creating links on plain text in the first place.

[Test Screen Name]

It creates links on plain text because that's its job. Normally the links are what you want. A PDF contains the characters "http://www.adobe.com" and it becomes a link. This is all based on guesswork. It isn't part of the PDF and isn't saved, and that's why turning off the option makes this stop.

So the question is, why does it do that? You could try selecting text from that area and doing copy/paste. See if it contains anything suggesting what the link becomes. Bear in mind it doesn't know your reading order so if you do things like change baseline it can get confused.

[bpeat]

Here's an example of the issue (I've blacked out someone's name and email link). If I hover over anything from the 8 in 800 all the way to the last " in customer" it triggers this link:

---

800)-856-3333–“stateRedAlertcustomer”belfor.com/en/us/belfor-usa-officesAccountManager:NAMEREMOVED-NAMEREMOVED@us.belfor.comInterstateRestoration—24-hourhotline:

---

Which opens my email as if it's a mailto: function.

If I look to see what links are active, there isn't one there at all. Nothing in any of the Accessibility stuff, nothing in the forms, links, nowhere.

You can see it's not forming any sort of link that makes any sense. Copying and pasting doesn't seem to give me anything but raw text. It's possible there's something mangled in Word and it's getting sent over, but there's no link on that text in Word and copying out and pasting back into word with raw text didn't seem to help (though I may try that again today).

It's without a doubt the strangest issue I've ever seen working with PDFs.

[bpeat]

It gets weirder and weirder. I copied the entire section off the page, deleted it, clean text pasted it into a text editor, copied it and pasted it back in place of the old text on the Word doc page. Then I styled it a bit, did NOT add any links, and exported to PDF again...and the links are STILL being generated as that mangled mail to with bits from that section.

Another test I just did (with the old text, before the copy paste text) was to set the Acrobat export plugin prefs in Word to NOT generate links. And it does indeed ignore other links that are in the Word doc...but the broken, random ones STILL end up active in the PDF. So something in the "Create Links from URLS" is still seeing the text as a url for some reason.

After the copy/paste, I exported with it set to not make bookmarks (the client wants them in), and not bring over any links (though Acrobat is still set to create links from urls as you open PDFs in it since the client won't know to uncheck that). THIS worked, so I suspect it's something in how Word sends bookmarks to Acrobat.

Finally, I exported my original doc without bookmarks, to see if that also worked, and I of course get no bookmarks, but also the bad links are still there lol.

I want to try a few more things to see if I can strip them out, but clearly there's something glitchy about the Word to PDF export.

[bpeat · Accepted solution]

Making progress. Based on what was IN the bad links, I took a guess that this was triggering it:

hotline: (

so I removed the : and the ( and exported. Sure enough, no bad links. Then it got weird. I put back the ( and changed the : to a - and the links came back.

So then I simply removed the ( from the front of the phone number and exported. No bad links. Go figure. For some reason, the ( on the front of an phone number is getting flagged as mailto: Makes no sense at all.

Edit: In the end, making the phones just 800-xxx-xxx with no ( ) did the trick. Still seems like a bug though, but at least I now have a working solution.

[Jason245259018xy7]

Ran into this same issue and found a fix. It seems to be an issue with how Word is exporting it, and not how Adobe is opening the document. 

1) File > Save As > Select .PDF for the file type and save a version of the document (which will contain the "mailto:" link).

2) Your original document should now show the same "mailto:" in the text location where it added it. Remove the text and re-save the document. 

3) Print/Export/Save As a new PDF and the text will not be added. 

4) Delete the version of the document that was having issues.