TOC Hyperlinks not working

[Dustin Fleming]

I created a book with a TOC and have the hyperlink text option selected on the settings but they do not seem to work when I click on the paragraph text or the page number there is no action. Is there something else I need to check?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

And your TOC is a generated file (i.e. book_nameTOC.fm)?

[Dustin Fleming]

Here are screenshots from all the aspects of the TOC. I can't control click them or control alt click. They do not work when I export to PDF either. Also I am very new to FM so I apologize if I missed any information that would be useful in helping me solve this issue.

[Bob_Niland]

In the PDF, when you hover the sprite (mouse pointer) over lines in the TOC, is it the case that nothing is active, or only part of each line.

If nothing, the next thing I'd check is the PDF setup.
If partially active, it's a Character Format problem at the source texts from which the TOC is generated.

[Dustin Fleming]

Nothing is active so it would seem in Adobe Acrobat or in Adobe FrameMaker. Where would I look in th PDF setup to correct this oversight?

[frameexpert · Accepted solution]

If you are still having problems with this, please contact me offlist. I will be glad to look at it via a web meeting. There would be no cost for this. rick at frameexpert dot com.

[Bob_Niland]

re: Where would I look in th PDF setup to correct this oversight?

Due to my new Win10 machine not being set up yet, I won't be able to explore that using the current verion of FM for another week or so.

[Walter5C49]

I'm using FrameMaker 2020 for a very large unstructured manual (over 400 document files and about 900 pages). In your response from 2019 to another user having problems, you said:

"In the PDF, when you hover the sprite (mouse pointer) over lines in the TOC, is it the case that nothing  is active, or only part of each line. If nothing, the next thing I'd check is the PDF setup. If partially active, it's a Character Format problem at the source texts from which the TOC is generated."

I know that my issue is a Character Format problem, because the link stops where the format from the linked material suddenly gets pulled into the TOC. I haven't figured out why some formatting gets pulled from the headings and some doesn't, or how to fix it. Can you help me with this?

For example, the TOC format is Times New Roman, but the headings are Arial, with most of the heading manually underlined (we cannot use an underlined paragraph format because the customer wants the underline to stop before the period at the end of the heading). In the TOC, some headings are all the wrong font and some are only partially the wrong font. Occassionally we get a heading that looks something like this (I'm using bold & underline to simulate the font from the heading that doesn't match the TOC font):

This is a Sample Heading

When I publish to pdf, the link stops where the text first changes. I have literally hundreds of headings that have this issue. Can you tell me how to fix this? When I look at the source material I can see that character formatting was used to underline these items, but can't see a difference between the ones that do work and the ones that don't. Thanks!

[Dustin Fleming]

@frameexpert was able to assist me in identifying that even though the markers were present in the TOC the following text was missing from the reference page was missing:
openObjectId <$relfilename>:<$ObjectType> <$ObjectId>

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

If nothing's active in FM, then you've got something wrong in there. Try renaming your non-functioning TOC and regenerate a new one - it won't look nice, but it should work.

[shalomb61686619]

I had a case in FM 2015 where the hyperlink on the very last line in the TOC did not work. I never figured it out. More exactly, the entire line should have been hyperlinked, and in all the other lines, it was. On the last line, the first part of the line did not, but the rest of the line was OK. 

[frameexpert]

Just to clarify FrameMaker's normal behavior: Whereever there is a character property change in a paragraph after the Hypertext marker, the link will stop.

There are a couple of scripting workarounds that I have done over the years:

1) Use a script to repeat the Hypertext marker at every character property change in the TOC. I usually have a script like this run automatically whenever the TOC is updated.

2) Use a script in Acrobat Pro to extend any "short" links on the TOC pages.

[Bob_Niland]

In many cases the fix is to switch to Unicode characters that avoid the need for Character Formats, or for simple decorations not really essential (bold, italic, etc.) just delete the Character Format from the TOC's catalog. More here.