Aaron Krigelski an Acrobat power user who runs Strutlegal, a company that helps lawyers create electronic briefs has great experience using Acrobat through many of the versions, going back at least as far as Acrobat 4. He offers the following as an annoyance that troubles him in the later versions of Acrobat.
“Going old school, Acrobat 4 had the best linking feature. As shown in this video, after selecting the link tool, you would draw the link box, go to the page, or page in another file, and set the link. If you wanted to make a link box around text, you just held down control and selected the text and followed the same steps as before. In Acrobat X, creating links, especially links that go around text, the process is more involved. If you want the link to go around text you don’t use the link tool, you use the “Selection Tool for text and images”. Then right click, select create link, select the type of link you want, then go to the target, and finally, set your link. It’s more or less gone from 1 click to create a link, to 3, including a right mouse click if you are using a PC.
Now fixing a link is a whole other story. When I have to edit a link it is usually to redirect a link to a specific part of the page. Sometimes the client will want the link directed to the bottom of the page rather than the top. In Acrobat 4, I would select the link tool, double click on the link which would then let me edit the link. I would say edit link and it would take me to where the link was directed currently. All I would have to do is page down and set the link. If I wanted to do the same thing in Acrobat X, it is so confusing I am better off deleting the old link and creating the new link from scratch.
I have had this issue with creating links ever since Acrobat 6 and I have sent an e-mail to their customer support and feature request teams each version since.”
We’ll see if Aaron’s annoyance gets addressed in future versions of Acrobat. If you have any annoyances, let us know by emailing me at esvenson@gmail.com. We’re looking more for UI problems, than for bugs, but we appreciate any feedback to help make Acrobat better.
Meanwhile, do any of you have issues with how Acrobat handles linking?