PDFMaker within Word 2010 is no longer converting styles with any level setting to PDF bookmarks

Report · Mar 19, 2016

Word 2010 (64-bit), Acrobat 11.0.15

For several months we have been able to convert Word 2010 documents to PDFs (via PDFMaker menu within Word) and retain the navigation entries created in Word. We have some user-created styles that are assigned Level 1 thru 3. These styles, which show up in the navigation panel in Word 2010 and are used to populate a TOC within these Word documents, have been converting directly into bookmarks for the PDFs created by PDFMaker. That is, until late yesterday.

To prove that this wasn't a specific Word document or new process which was causing the problem, I retrieved several Word documents that were converted last month without an issue. All of them now do not generate bookmarks for the PDFs.

I do see the ability to toggle specific styles in the Acrobat->Preferences->Bookmarks menu within Word, but this doesn't always work and it appears to be required to be set for each document. In addition, toggling the styles causes PDFMaker to visually scroll through the document. Previously, there are a slight hesitation within PDFMaker, then the application showed a timeline for conversion within Word.

Given the styles menu mentioned before, I am not sure why the styles with Level 1-3 assignments automatically generated bookmarks in the PDFs before, but it always worked that way (unless I set an option long ago and forgot it).

Just to confuse matters further, I restored the defaults within PDFMaker. No help. It should be noted I can manually reassign sections of a Word document from a user-defined style to one of the Heading styles, and those will appear as PDF bookmarks.

Report · Mar 19, 2016

Update: In an attempt to get a test file prepared in case someone asked for it, I created a blank document, added some text, and created a style set to Level 1 for the header of this test file. Imagine my surprise when PDFMaker created a PDF with a bookmark for the created style set to Level 1. I exited this text document and Word, then went back to my problem documents. They all work now! :confused:

I really wish I knew what I did to fix this issue. I have re-created PDFs from five separate Word documents, two from last month, two from this morning, plus a new one this afternoon. The PDFs have the expected bookmarks for the Word styles set to Level 1-3 (I don't have any from Level 4-9).

I don't know if this request should be closed as resolved. I still would be curious if anyone had an idea of why Word/PDFMaker seemed to have lost the ability to create PDF bookmarks of user-set styles @ Level 1-3.

Report · Apr 26, 2016

The problem returned today, and what I did the last time to "correct" the problem didn't work this time. I rebooted the PC in hopes of clearly out memory to fix this problem, but still a no-go.

I am definitely stumped as to why this occurs on occasion and what I did the first time to clear out the problem.

Report · Apr 14, 2017

Well, it has happened again. I have noted there was an update to Acrobat XI that we installed a couple of days ago. It's possible I missed this the previous times this occurred. Like the last time, I am unable to get Word to generate PDFs with bookmarks. I believe it will eventually work again. I just wish I knew a way to get this working again right away.

Anyone else experience this?