Link to text anchor in another doc going to first page

Report · Mar 13, 2016

I'm not sure if this is an InDesign issue or an Acrobat issue - starting here. I'm creating a set of PDFs, one of which links out (extensively) to the other two. I have created named text anchors (in InDesign) in the linked-to PDFs. Before creating the rest of the links I decided to run a quick test (as I've had so many unexpected issues with this kind of thing in the past). Sure enough, the link from PDF1 to PDF2's named anchor goes to PDF2's first page. The named anchor exists in PDF2, and when I navigate to it using the Destinations panel it goes to the correct spot. If I edit my link, replacing the named anchor with the same named anchor from the Browse list, it is still broken (goes to first page). I have triple-checked that the naming matches exactly (including the number that gets generated during export and added to the anchor name). INDD files and PDFs are both in the same folder.

The last time I did this I think I had an earlier version of Creative Cloud - is it possible this extremely important functionality is broken in 2015 (or Acrobat DC)? This is basically a disaster scenario for me if so (think creating 1000s of links by hand) - I am open to any suggestions about things I might check. TIA

Report · Mar 14, 2016

I think I've figured this out - it seems like there are some illegal characters in anchor names. Cleaning out anything that isn't a letter, number, or a dash seems to have solved the problem (fingers crossed but so far so good).