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Question

Keeping links from a placed PDF active in InDesign exported PDF?

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
April 21, 2025
4 replies
947 views

I'm working on a large (500+pg) technical manual-type document. Many pages are placed PDF's that someone else created in Word. The exported (from Word) PDF's have hyperlinks built-in such as "CLICK HERE to access the supplemental video" (not a typed-out URL). These links work fine in Acrobat. They even work fine if I combine a bunch of those PDF's together via Acrobat. But if I try to place the PDF's into my InDesign document, only the typed URL links or Mailto: links work (such as "ourcompanyname.com" or contactus@company.com, , none of the "CLICK HERE" style links work.
Is there any way to incorporate these PDF's from Word, with clickable links, into my InDesign document so when I export my final PDF, they are still clickable/active without having to re-build every one of them as a button in InDesign? There are far too many to do that and it would be a nightmare when the document needs to be updated/page flow changes and them I'm trying to find and move all the buttons.
Just as an FYI, I also have the table of contents (Chapters & sections) built from the content in the document as well. So simply replacing pages in my final PDF with the ones exported from Word isn't an option either...I need those text boxes with the paragraph styles on those pages. I don't think any screen grabs are particularly useful but if anyone needs any, let me know.

Thank in advance for any help or insight anyone may have!

C

CoriC_USAAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for all of the suggestions, everyone. There was no magic pill for this, as I suspected, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything the gurus are using!

JR Boulay

Community Expert

- InDesign import PDFs without any interactive feature, so any link object is lost.

- Use the "Hyperlink" object instead of a button, since it works in any PDF reader (even in the worst low-end reader).

- If you can import DOCX files instead of PDFs that's always more productive (fonts management, interactivity, accessibility, etc).

- Feel free to export PDFs to DOCXs with Acrobat Pro if you can't get the original files.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

C

CoriC_USAAuthor

Participating Frequently

I looked into this. I got a handful of the 20+ Word files to review and none of them are set up with styles to make importing to INDD less painful...and they want to keep their Word files as the source of truth and not have 2 documents to update.

I think this is just going to be one of those PITA annual projects I have to expect. If they don't want to update their word documents to use styles, and want to keep their files as the original, they'll have to give up some of the interactivity they are asking for. I'll have to give up on my INDD document with self-updating table of contents, and just combine all of these PDF's via Acrobat, and insert my "designed" pages as separate PDF's where needed. I've created the bookmarks and links in the Table of Contents. I'll just have to suck it up and understand that if the table of contents changes, I'll have to re-create / re-shuffle the boxes that are created for the links.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@CoriC_USA

Not necessarily 😉

If you work on Windows - and you could convince them to buy my tool for a week or two every year - you would've some options:

1) configure my tool to "react accordingly" to PDFs generated from WORDs - link to specific ones when generating TOC, etc. - hardcode which one is which,

2) as long as the name of placed PDF is the same as WORD file - my tool can automatically open corresponding WORD file and extract / look for information - even if there are no styles and only some specific formatting.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@CoriC_USA

Do you have original WORD files - or only PDFs?

C

CoriC_USAAuthor

Participating Frequently

I don't have possession of them at this time, but I'm sure I could get them.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

I don't have possession of them at this time, but I'm sure I could get them.

By @CoriC_USA

Then maybe it would be better to import them into InDesign? And make them as INDD documents?

BobLevine

Community Expert

They're working because Acrobat is automatically recognizing them. When you place a PDF into InDesign it's being placed as static so when you export a new PDF containing it, the auto recognition works for those spelled out but the others are not going to work.

There's not much you can do about, either beyond a bunch of kludgy workarounds like drawing an empty button which may or may not work in most third party readers.

C

CoriC_USAAuthor

Participating Frequently

Yea, I kind of figured that is why the typed URLs were working as well. Thanks for the feedback. It's always good to make sure I'm not missing something obvious to others.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Also worth noting that not all PDF readers will do that and while Acrobat's default for that is on, there's no assurance that a user hasn't turned it off.

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