Word Hyperlinks Converted to Acrobat 7 (Wd 2003)

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Hello all,

Happy March, soon to be April!

My Question:
Can I force hyperlinks in a PDF to open in a new browser window?

Here’s my situation.

1. In Word 2003, I create a document and include hyperlinks to url’s on the Web.
2. Then I convert the document in Word 2003 using the Adobe Acrobat add-in to a Acrobat PDF document.
3. The default Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard settings recognize the hyperlinks created in Word 2003.
4. Then this PDF is published to our Intranet, various Web pages link to this PDF.
5. The PDF is displayed in the browser (almost always in IE6).
6. The user clicks the hyperlink (previously created in Word) and the resulting Web page replaces the PDF in the same browser window. Thus, the PDF is not available to view at the same time as the resulting Web page.

I know we can, in Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard edit each link. Since we have hundreds and hundreds of these links in PDFs on our Intranet, that would be a huge task. We are looking for a way in Word 2003 (VBA or Javascript, perhaps?) to set the hyperlinks such that when converted Adobe Acrobat would recognize that we want to open the hyperlink in a new browser window. It could be there is something similar in Adobe Acrobat we could run on each PDF document???

Any suggestions? Any resources out there for Adobe Acrobat I could look at, or perhaps participate in a forum like this wonderful Woody’s resource??

Thanks and blessings,
Rich

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I don’t have Acrobat. Can you test the attached document? The Word hyperlink has a target assigned (using the “Target Frame…” button of the Hyperlinks dialog), which should convert to target=”_blank” in HTML.

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Hi Jefferson,

Thanks for the thought, but we’ve tried that, and during the conversion, Adobe Acrobat ignores the “Target Frame” setting.

The hyperlink comes over, but, hope against hope, it doesn’t keep the equivalent of target=”_blank” in HTML.

We’ll keep working at it!
Cheers,
Rich

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Rich

As you’ve discovered, the functionality you want just doesn’t exist (at least not in PDF files created using Acrobat ). Many others would agree that it’s a long overdue feature.

If you’re working on an intranet only, can you change each users default setting so that PDF files open in a PDF reader rather than in a browser? You’d then have the two open windows that you want, though I guess there’d be some trade-offs.

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