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General discussion

Visio 2007 hyperlinked files not opening when saving as pdf

Jan 6, 2011 12:57AM PST

I have added a link to some shapes within my Visio drawing. From within Visio itself the link works (whether the linked file is a pdf or another Visio drawing).

When I use the Save As feature to save the Visio drawing as a pdf the link is present in the pdf drawing but the file does not open. Instead I receive an error message that the file can't be found.

This same problem happens whether I use relative or absolute locations.

Discussion is locked

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No real clues from me, except a basic one
Jan 6, 2011 4:45AM PST

I don't know Visio so only a basic question from me.

When you "Save as", where do you save to?

If you save to the same folder as you were working from then I can't help. But if you are changing directories at the Save As stage, then any relative link might fail.

Don't know about absolute links, but that does seem strange. When you hover over an absolute link in the saved PDF, does the link read true? And is the target still where it is supposed to be?

There may be some particular method of inserting these links in Visio, but I will have to leave that to others.

Mark

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Visio 2007 hyperlinked files not opening when saving as pdf
Jan 26, 2011 1:30AM PST

I have received an answer for this from Microsoft. The hyperlink paths cannot have any spaces in them (neither the folder nor the filename). I've confirmed this by removing all spaces from the directory name and filename and the link worked.

This is unfortunate as Word does not have this restriction (also confirmed this morning).

I just thought I'd post this resolution for anybody who might be searching in the future.

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Ahh of course.
Jan 26, 2011 5:25AM PST

And I should have realised and offered that. My apologies.

There is a way around that. In URL encoding spaces are signalled by a special group of characters. I haven't had to consider this for some time but I believe that spaces in a url need to be replaced with %20

eg www.mywebsite.com/my%20index%20folder/ will find www.mywebsite.com/my index folder/

May be you could experiment.

Mark

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Visio 2007 hyperlinked files not opening when saving as pdf
Jan 28, 2011 12:58AM PST

That's the odd part...when I hover my mouse over the shape in the saved pdf file, the link does NOT show the %20 for teh spaces. However, when I click the link, I get a Security Warning permission box and I have to select Allow to continue. That warning box shows the full path and does show the %20.

When I click allow and the system attempts to open the file, I get a failure warning message. That failure message again shows the full path but instead of just the %20, the path shows %2520 for each space character.

Again, Word and Excel don't do this, only Visio.