Office 365 Word Version 2312 Build 17126.20132) Current Channel.
Adobe Acrobat Pro. Current download January 2024.
Word with PDFMaker is creating what "appears" to be Relative Hyperlinks (links that are portable and will work wherever the documents reside on other computers) in Office 365 Word but these links are really absolute hyperlinks (links that retain the directory path of the computer the word file was created on). Alt-F9 in Word shows the hyperlink as relative, no directory path. This appearance is deceiving.
When the PDF is created using Word's Adobe PDFMaker, the resulting links in the PDF are absolute, they show the directory path from the computer the Word file resides on. This renders any PDFs as not portable when you move these PDFs to another computer. The links fails on the other computer unless the other computer's directory path is exactly the same as the directory path of the source computer the PDF's came from.
There is no way in Word or in the PDF to remove the directory path to keep the link relative. If in Word you edit the hyperlink and delete the directory path portion of the link, the directory path reappears after saving the link if you try to edit it again. You cannot edit the hyperlink path in the PDF file.
So the problem is that there is no way for Word and Adobe PDFMaker to create relative PDF's. This becomes a big problem when we need to distribute these PDF's to clients. We cannot create portable PDF documents anymore.