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I am working on a book in Word 2019 and would ideally like to have the docx to be fit both for making PDFs for KDP print books, and for making Kindle books. I am willing to save to HTML and patch the HTML if I have to, but I would like my own table of contents to link chapter titles to the opening text for the chapter.

I followed Add hyperlinks to a location within the same document and thought I had registered internal links successfully, by selecting the text I wanted to be a link, right-clicking on it, specifying an internal link, and then selecting a header. I did this with apparent success.

Then later, I went to try the links, and found them all irrelevant external links to locations posited to exist in the containing folder. The docx I am editing is itself at path C:\Users\<username>\Documents\<title>.docx, the link for the introduction works in that a control-click on it takes the user to the heading "Introduction", but none of the links to a heading containing a space work.

What happens when I click on the table of contents entry for "The Big Picture" is that on hover it displays a URL of file:///c:\users\<username>\documents\the, and control-clicking it gets a modal dialog saying "Cannot get the specified file."

The documentation page I linked to says that right-clicking on a selection should provide an option to put a "bookmark" at that text, but when I select part of the heading and right-click, I do not see a bookmark. (The page does refer to an older version of Word.)

How can I make actual, working internal links?

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  • How have you managed to create bookmarks with blanks in them? My Word 365 won't let do that.
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 19:13
  • By following my nose. Word 2019 let me appear to do that, with apparent success on headings containing a space.
    – Christos Hayward
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 19:18
  • "Apparent" is perhaps the right word, but "bug" may be another (fixed in Word 365).
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 19:19
  • It may be a defect fixed that it shows apparent success instead of clearly disallowing it, but I would like some good and working way to link to headings containing a space.
    – Christos Hayward
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 20:02
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    Insert pane, Links drop-down list.
    – harrymc
    Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 12:58

1 Answer 1

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In Word, the format of a bookmark name is :

  • may be between 1 and 40 characters long
  • may consist of a combination of letters, digits and underscores
  • may not start with a digit
  • may not contain any kind of white space or punctuation.

The problem of the poster was that somehow Word let him define bookmark names with blanks, on top of text containing blanks. They then became unusable for linking. This is probably a bug which I tested, and is already fixed in Word 365.

Creating bookmarks is done in the Insert pane, Links drop-down list.

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