I am doing a large-scale conversion of a legacy website, making archival PDFs of the HTML site to store them as archival data on the new site.

Me: I just finished the PDFs and uploaded them to the dev website for testing and review.

Client: The PDFs work great! There are just a few bookmark (e.g. #CAN) links that are dead.

Me: Well, the way those kinds of links work is handled differently in each browser’s pdf viewer. The one you’re using only directs you to the top of the page the destination is on, and since the destination for some of them is on the same page, they’re effectively jumping to where they already are. There isn’t much I can do outside of just removing the links to prevent confusion on shorter PDFs.

Client: I found a fix in how we’ve addressed this before. Take a look.

The client sent me a page that had been “fixed.” It was a different issue altogether and offered no solutions.

Still, I spent a full day trying and failing to work around the browser’s own API. No luck.

Me: I tried implementing your fix and got the same behavior. Again, because the way these links work is beholden to how each browser handles them, the links won’t work any better than how each pdf viewer is coded to use them.

Client: I checked again and the pdfs are almost ready! As soon as we fix those dead links we’ll be all done!

Source: Clients from Hell