I’m doing a document in Word, and I’m putting some hyper-links into it as references. I find the web-page I want to reference, copy the link from Safari, switch to Word, us the command-K function to insert the link and a name, and all’s good.
Except, when I open the document the next time to work on it, the text of the web-page is all gibbled.
For example, this link:
When I click on it in my Word document, I get this in Safari:
Much, much more; I just copied the first bit as an example.
And then, if I take that link and try pasting it in a new screen in Safari, it gives me the same result, but if I paste it into Firefox, it takes me to the web-page.
Any thoughts why Word is screwing up like this? I just want a nice Word doc with hyper-links, dammit! Is that so hard?
So apparently Safari is receiving a PDF file from the website, but isn’t recognizing it as a PDF file. So it just sprays the Martian poetry right onto your screen thinking it’s human-readable text.
FWIW, on my Windows tablet it downloads a perfectly cromulent 36 page PDF.
Some websites do tricks to make it “challenging” to hotlink to their documents. They want to show anyone the whole webpage with the ads and all the rest. Not just be an unpaid content server for pdfs.
That’s real unlikely to be the cause of your issue with the Algerians. I’d sooner bet it’s something to do with multi-lingual stuff where Safari is getting confused vs how the website is advertising itself and it’s supported languages. When I dig deeper I see the home page of the Algerian Embassy to Norway is serving me pages of English words internally labeled as being in the French language.
I think we can see where the problem probably lies.
It is almost certain that whatever problem you have it isn’t in Word or in the hyperlink itself. It’s a glitch between Safari and that website.
Beyond that, since you’re on a Mac I’ll hush up and let the Mac experts chime in. I’ve exhausted my Macpertise.
As other posters have said, you’re seeing what a binary PDF file looks like when a web browser thinks it’s supposed to be rendered as plain text.
In this case, the web server is right and your browser is wrong, the server is setting the correct content-type of “application/pdf”*. Somehow your copy of Safari is ignoring this server and falling-back to the default content-type, which is plain text.
*) The server is setting “content-type” instead of the more commonly-seen “Content-Type”, but HTTP headers are case-insensitive so this shouldn’t matter, if Safari were following the spec.
I clicked on that link in Safari for Mac, and it opened in the PDF reader (but with a 404 page, since apparently I can’t access the link).
I pasted that link into (Mac) Word with command-K and used it as the address, then saved, closed, and re-opened the document. Clicking on the link in Word takes me to a 404 page in the browser, as does copying the link itself and pasting it into Safari.
Do you possibly have something (ad blocker, would be my guess) that’s changing how your browser views links?
ETA - the site itself seems to be changing; I just tried your link again from Safari and Word, and it gave me a PDF just like it was supposed to; something about the Algerian constitution.
Thanks for all the comments, everyone. I appreciate it.
The problem seems to be web-site specific. I’m linking to a number of web-pages in my Word document, and most of them are displaying correctly. Some of them, however, give me the pdf salad.
I don’t have the technical expertise to fix this, so I think I’ll just have to keep hunting for on-line sources for certain documents and find out by trial and error if they work or not, once I link to them in my Word doc.
I started just copying and pasting. When that started to give me the gibberish, I switched to the “Insert Link” command on MS-Word: ⌘-K. Still doesn’t work.
Didn’t know about Paste Link. I’ll give that a try.
No ad blocker, no. I rely on Mac-Invincibility!
It works just fine for me on Safari on my iPhone. It’s very weird.
To repeat: All of this has nothing to do with Word. The problem is entirely between their website and your browser.
Welcome to the fun world of IT, where proper website testing involves using 20 versions of several browsers to see how your site looks in each and every one of them. Followed by changing something to fix the glitches without trashing even more of the other browsers’ presentations.
