I lose hyperlinks when converting a Word doc to pdf using Acrobat Distiller 5.0

[janis_childers@adobeforums.com]

I have a long Word 2002 document which contains external hyperlinks and Table of Contents formatting (internal links?). I need to be able to convert this document into a PDF file and retain the links. When I use Acrobat Distiller 5.0, the links are converted to text exactly as it appears (blue, underlined), but they are just text not a link.

Is there a way to do this using Distiller 5.0? Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Jan

[Jonathan_H@adobeforums.com]

You need to use the PDFMaker which is installed with Adobe Acrobat to achieve this. If you have Distiller 5 then is it safe to assume you have Acrobat 5?

If so then update it to 5.0.5 and you should have PDFMaker icons in Excel, Word and Powerpoint.

[janis_childers@adobeforums.com]

Thank you for the quick and very helpful response. I had Acrobat 5.0.5, but did not have the icons in Word. I uninstalled Acrobat and reinstalled (this time upgrading to 6) and I now have the icons. This fixes my problem: PDFmaker does a great job of converting the Word into PDF while keeping the embedded Word structures.

In the past, our office has always used Distiller. Does anybody know when one should use Distiller and when PDFmaker?

Thanks for your help!
Jan

[William_A._Davis@adobeforums.com]

Distiller (or Adobe PDF if you upgraded to AA6) is the basic print driver. PDFMaker uses the same print driver, but adds PDFMarks to create the features you desire for links and such. If you want a basic print style document, use the printer. If you want the added features of PDFMaker you it. Keep in mind, the added features often add a lot of size to a PDF. That is a compromise that you should be aware of. You don't get all the extras for nothing.

[cro]

Open Office.org will save you hours and money. The pdf printer keeps links natively
the only problem may be the font you use if you are on a mac. Sometimes special
fonts may not be recognized correctly even if they are otf and available on the system
but for standard jobs no problem open office is perfect.

[Unregistered]

Thank you for the quick and very helpful response. I had Acrobat 5.0.5, but did not have the icons in Word. I uninstalled Acrobat and reinstalled (this time upgrading to 6) and I now have the icons. This fixes my problem: PDFmaker does a great job of converting the Word into PDF while keeping the embedded Word structures.

In the past, our office has always used Distiller. Does anybody know when one should use Distiller and when PDFmaker?

Thanks for your help!
Jan[/QUOTE]

Using Distiller keeps the same page flow as the printed document. PDFmaker, unfortunately, does not. We have long documents and need the links but find that PDFmaker is changing the page flow so we are unable to use it. Hope they plan to add link capability to Distiller soon.