This used to work for us, then suddenly started failing around March. After several horrific, frustrating 2-hour interactions with Adobe support (in which they have repeatedly promised to escalate the problem, but apparently have not), it's still not working.
Here's the deal:
Word 2013
Acrobat Pro DC
Very large files (the problem seems to start occurring around 700 pages; the document I am working on now is around 1800 pages)
What we've tried:
* uninstalling and reinstalling the programs
* running installation repairs
We can run a PDF outside of Word, but we need to use the Add-in to tweak the bookmarks (we need to set Heading 7 bookmarks to be at the Level 1 heading in the final PDF). And yes, we could do that manually, but this has worked for years (like over 10 years), so why should we have to set things manually now after all this time?
One thing I did do early on (back in March 2016) was back out a bunch of Office updates. This fixed the problem, but our IT has things set up so that updates are automatically forced, so we would have to remove the updates every time we ran a large PDF. I did not identify the specific update that caused the problem, and it takes about 3 hours of processing before the problem occurs, so identifying the specific update that is causing the problem also seems daunting.
We have access to a system that still has Word 2010 and Acrobat Pro XI installed, so we can produce a PDF with correct bookmarks. However, it seems like we should be able to use the current software that we are paying a monthly subscription fee for instead of relying on old versions.
Has anyone else had this issue and figured out a better solution than going back to old versions?
Now for the diatribe against Adobe support - you can stop reading now if you don't want to hear slavering ranting:
I first reported this issue in March 2016. It is now June 2016. They have promised to escalate this issue 3 times, but I have yet to get a call back. My IT department has had to call and remind them of the case every time.
I spent 15 minutes tonight trying to get Adobe support to find the case number at the phone number and with the case number they told me to use today. They finally found it, but it's somehow attached in their system to the first case number that was entered back in March 2016.
I spent another 15 minutes getting the person who answered the phone to get my email address right. Between the bad connection and language differences, it took quite a while to communicate that my name contains a "b" as in "boy" not a "d" as in "dog" and my company name contains a "t" as in "tom" not a "p" as in "paul." Also, for some bizarre reason, they attached this case report to the IT billing department email address instead of either the IT person's email or my own. They cannot seem to remove the IT billing department's email from this case, so some poor woman in IT billing is getting emails on a PDF problem that she knows nothing of. Fortunately she was kind enough to figure out who I was (she works in a different opco, so it wasn't easy) and forwarded them to me.
We finally got to the actual purpose of the call (which was to report that their efforts in today's 2 hour phone extravaganza, where the tech support guy was obviously off on other calls at the same time, were a waste of time - the problem still occurs), and she told me they would call me back. They specifically asked me to call with the results, so I pushed back and asked her to at least add the information I was giving her, but who knows if she did.
I still don't think they really understand what the problem is, so not sure if they can figure it out. Hoping someone here can!
(Side note - I am not wowed by the Cloud version - got bit in the butt by another issue a few weeks ago that prevented creation of review PDFs. Fortunately lots of other people had the same problem and Adobe sent out a fix, but really, waking up to non-working software when we're on a tight deadline is a nightmare).
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