I am using Acrobat XI Professional and Word 2013 running under Windows 8.

I want to create hyperlinks in my document using Word 2013. When Word 2013 generates a PDF version of the document, it reproduces the hyperlink save for the ‘#’ symbol – it replaces the ‘#’ symbol with ‘%23’.

Consider the Word 2013 document http://www.aespen.ca/AETests/HyperlinkTestNumber1.docx.

Consider its PDF version: http://www.aespen.ca/AETests/HyerlinkTestNumber1.pdf.

The hyperlink works in Word 2013. However, when I click on the hyperlink or the URL on the PDF version of the document in Acrobat, Acrobat launches IE (my web browser) using the URL with the ‘%23’ symbol, and the web server says that it cannot find the file (HTTP 404 file not found).

To mitigate the task of manually changing the ‘%23’ back to ‘#’ in Acrobat, I wanted to use JavaScript to change the links. Unfortunately, it looks like the Link object does not provide a way to “read” the URL associated with the link (Adobe, 2007).

Is it possible to find the URL or ‘cPath’ in the Link so that I can replace the URL or ‘cPath’ of the link or create a new Link based on the information on the existing link?

Is this is related to the notes about the ‘#’ symbol on the last page of the document on parameters for opening PDF files (Adobe, 2008)?

References

Adobe Systems Incorporated. (2007). Adobe Acrobat SDK 8.1 JavaScript for Acrobat API Reference for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. [Edition 2.0]. Retrieved on March 8, 2010 from http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/a crobat/pdfs/js_api_reference.pdf.

Adobe Systems Incorporated. (2008). Adobe Acrobat SDK 9.0 Parameters for Opening PDF Files for Microsfot Windows, Mac OS and UNIX. [Edition 2.0].