Hyperlinks in Table of Figures

Question

I am currently writing my final year dissertation that will be submitted on line rather than in hand due to the pandemic. I am having issues when converting to PDF. My table of figures includes figures, equations and tables. However, the links in my table of figures to figures are not working but the links to tables and equations work perfectly. I have looked online and still not found solutions. I have tried on both mac and windows but still have the issues. The links all work perfectly fine in word.

Answer 1

Hi Nisha,

It appears all three captions showing in your Table of Figures were inserted using the Insert Caption feature.

I inserted my own picture and it worked fine.

I notice in the Word document, the link is also to a hard-coded address, not just to a bookmark in the document.

I tried changing your figure and caption to being in-line with text. That works fine.

Here are temporary links to the document:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0xhbdq01ykn85w/delet...

and the pdf::

https://www.dropbox.com/s/85iylrwb49noh82/delet...

I then tried having only the caption be in-line-with text instead of in a textbox. That also works fine.

Here is a temporary link to that document.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/civuqcc9ife0lxs/delet...

So, I have no explanation, but hope that this workaround, of having at least the caption be in-line-with text works for you. To do that, I copied the caption from its textbox, deleted the textbox, and pasted the caption text. I then applied the Caption style to it and centered.

Someone wiser than me may know why the caption in the textbox caused problems in the Table of Figures.

Also, MVP Doug Robbins has found that in documents with XML tag matching problems that almost always it is as a result of graphics not being inserted in-line-with-text. While that does not always cause problems, I try to place all graphics in-line-with-text.

Answer 2

Further clarificaton -- I do not know whether it is that the caption is in a textbox or that it is not in-line-with-text that causes the problem. I suspect that it is in a textbox.

Also, you may want to update your TOC and TOF (entire table) before saving as pdf. This refreshes and simplifies the links.

Answer 3

When i use SaveAs pdf in Word for Windows, I get this for the link, which is, IMO, bizarre. I will keep looking.

Answer 4

Hi Charles, 

Thank you for responding. I am a mac user so I 'save as' and click to PDF and select best for electronic distribution.

I have created a document that is similar to my set up here and also converted to pdf so you can see what the document is supposed to do in word versus what happens in pdf. (There are links in contents and tables but also cross references thorughout the text) https://1drv.ms/f/s!AsA5oFEsYk9VlihdFvOQ4CE00xd5

I appreciate your help!

Thanks, 

Nisha

Answer 5

Hello Nisha,

My name is Charles Kenyon and I am an Independent Advisor in this forum . This forum is a user-to-user support forum. I am a fellow user with decades of experience using Microsoft Word. I have written extensively on using Word and have help articles on the Microsoft site.

How are you converting to pdf?

If you want, save a sample document with the problem on OneDrive or Dropbox and paste a view link here. Remove any confidential or sensitive information first. I or someone else can take a look at it. You can use the Rand function in Word to generate random text if you need to. See Suzanne Barnhill's article at http://wordfaqs.ssbarnhill.com/DummyText.htm.

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This is a link to a trusted Word MVP website or blog. It contains accurate safe information that I think will help you.

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For OneDrive: See https://support.office.com/article/share-onedri...

For DropBox: See https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/vi...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for...

Such a sample should have at least one problem figure, and the table of figures.

I hope this information helps.

Please let me know if you have any more questions or require further help.

You can ask for more help by replying to this post (Reply button below).

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