To avoid the problem altogether, when converting from Word to PDF: However, this could be a time-consuming operation for documents containing many such links. To do so, activate the Link tool, right-click the link in question, select Properties, Actions, Edit, and then edit the link in the Edit URL dialogue box. You can, of course, manually edit such a link in Acrobat to change the “%23” back to a “#” character. Figure 1: a broken external link Fixing the problem manually
The problem is that links with anchors, on conversion to PDF, often end up with the “#” symbol converted to “%23”. Fortunately, there is a simple workaround, albeit with one minor caveat (concerning PDF/A format documents). Word documents that include links with anchors can cause problems when exported to PDF.
