I'm no expert but my experience is that "print to save as PDF" is basically more or less taking a picture of the document and saving that picture as a pdf file. The hyperlinks don't get translated as hyperlinks since this is just a "print" of the document.
It depends on the PDF engine used, but generally this is not the case: hyperlinks are preserved, when Print -- Save as PDF is used:
This is in Preview ^^
Interactive, I am not familiar with MS Office, but I thought all office suites have a built-in PDF creator -
OpenOffice and
Libre Office certainly do. If the problem persists, it might be worth checking these out - great software, not to mention it's free.
There could be a couple of reasons for hyperlink not to work, as far as I can see:
- Security settings prevent any hyperlink to function in a PDF document, so the question would be: do you have any other PDF files, with working active hyperlinks?
- Word might have placed restrictions on Save as PDF function in the print menu. To verify this, can you try to create a PDF file from, say a webpage, like the one above?
What does the Tools | Show Inspector tells you under PDF Producer in the problem file, in Preview?
It could also be 'Acrobat PDF Maker for Word' - I've just looked through a few docs, sent by a colleague who, I know, is using Microsoft digital contraptions ;P