Problems with active hyperlinks in Word 2008 to pdf conversion

Question

I'm hoping someone can help me with this.
When converting from Word 2008 to a pdf document, the only hyperlinks that are actually "hot" are the ones that have an 'http://www.' text in front of the url address.
In other words, if I have this link 'kingofcopy.com/max' and this link 'http://www.kingofcopy.com/max' written in the Word document, and BOTH links are hyperlinked to 'http://www.kingofcopy.com/max' OR even 'http://www.kingofcopy.com/max/index.html' only the text link with the FULL url displayed (http://www.kingofcopy.com/max) is an actual active hot link.
What's strange though, is all the text that's hyperlinked, is blue and underlined and is "hot" in Word, just not in the pdf.
I really hope someone has a clue here because this is very frustrating. Thanks in advance, Craig
BTW, running Word 2008 on Mac 10.5.8

Answer 1

Hi Craig,
Did some testing this arvo with Word 2008 12.1.5 (can't install SP2 due to me using v13 of Entourage). I created a document with hyperlinks and found similar results to what you have mentioned.
My word document had three hyperlinks; one with the full URL, one without the leading http and one with just a single word, but using the menu a hyperlink was made to a web site. As you said, all three entries appeared in the Word document with a blue underline and by hovering over the link, the URL would appear in a yellow pop-up.
I then made two pdf's, one using the default PDF button within the print dialog and one using the Adobe PDF 8.0 printer queue (which is working okay for me).
With both PDF's, I have to open them in Acrobat 8.1.6. None of the hyperlinks work for either document when I open them using Preview
With either document opened in Acrobat, the hyperlink with the full URL and the hyperlink with the URL starting with just 'www' show the link when I hover over them. But, for the single word that is still hyperlinked to the same web site as the other two links, no URL is displayed when moving the mouse of the link.
So it looks like there is a limitation to creating hyperlinks in Word if you are going to convert them to PDF. This may already be noted somewhere so I will have a snoop around for an existing solution.
Pahu