[macOS 27] Internal hyperlinks quit compiling to pdf

I suspect this issue is somehow related to updating my macbook to OS Golden Gate on Monday.

There’s a project I’ve been working on that’s heavy on internal hyperlinks. As far as I can tell, the hyperlinks complied to pdf without any issue, until yesterday. Preview & Adobe read and responded to them just fine, they even worked when I sent the pdfs to my Kindle.

Now, the links simply do not function. I can see they still exist in Adobe—the readers are registering where hyperlinked text exists on the page—but they’ve been stripped of pointers to their destinations elsewhere in the complied document.

In Adobe, I can stick equivalent pointers back into the empty links without much of a fuss. The adjusted pdf saves just fine, and the new version loads and functions across platforms as well—but its a nuisance, and doubly upsetting, because of the fact that the problem didn’t exist until yesterday.

Now I’ve futzed around with so many settings I’m afraid that I’ve made matters worse. If anyone knows how to straighten the problem out, my family would undoubtedly appreciate hearing less of me swearing at the computer.

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Do you have a PDF that worked before the update, and does it still work?

That is, is the problem that Scrivener is no longer embedding working links, or that the reader software you’re using can no longer follow them?

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I have several pdf’s compiled from the same project (ie. .scriv file). They span a few revisions over the course of a couple of weeks. All of them still work wherever I open them—Adobe, Preview, and the links work when I export the pdf’s to my Kindle Scribe.

Since Tuesday, I pdfs I’ve compiled look fine—all the formatting is dead on. Footers work fine, footnotes appear, all the fonts are still kicking out without any issue. The only problem seems to be that the internal links don’t point to anywhere.

In Adobe I can see that tagged text still registers as a link, but Acrobat Pro prompts me to assign functions to them—which I can do without an issue. I save the pdf from there, with the links assigned, and the pdf will open and work elsewhere (Preview, back on the Kindle). It also reopens in Adobe with everything intact.

So I don’t know where the links are getting stripped away. On Scrivener itself, the hyperlinks still function—I can follow them around within the project, or have their target open in a separate pane.

It’s puzzling.

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I experienced today something probably related to this issue. Since upgrading to MacOS 27 Scrivener’s pdf generation is broken. There is no table of content in Preview anymore. Opening a pdf that I generated a week or two ago contains the TOC like I am used to. So I checked the checkboxes as various web pages and Gemini suggested but nothing made a difference. I also tried to generate a printed table of contents (with <$toc>), but that page was not populated.

I also found that using using formatting styles is broken, at least regarding indentation of the second paragraph and following … No idea if that has something to do with this at all.

Thanks for the report. This does appear to be very easily reproduced in macOS 27. I’ll get it written up.

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Let me just add that indentation is also missing when generating a Word document.

There should be no overlap in the code between a problem like that and the above. Please submit a new bug report thread with detailed instructions on what that means (there are several kinds of indentation, for a start).

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