when converting MS word document with images and these images have hyperlinks, these hyperlinks are not available in PDF
Ghostscript doesn't process MS Word documents directly. There is a piece of software that converts the MS Word cocument to PostScript file first. Please attach the intermediate PostScript file to this bug report.
Adobe Distiller generated pdf contains hyperlinks because of two conditions: (1) Adobe Distiller installs a set of word VBA macros called PDFMaker into M$ Word, which pre-processes the word documents during distilling to insert the relevant pdfmarks marking the url's, etc into the postscript stream, so that Distiler can use them. (same apply to internal links such as section headers, table of contents) (2) to get the internal links such as toc/section reference, footnotes correct, you have to structure your word documents strictly with the relevant styles. The open-source equivalent to (1) is http://ghostword.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.schmitz-huebsch.net/gs4word/ - unless you are using ghostword, gs4word or PDFMaker, this bug is probably invalid. Openoffice also does pdf export keeping hyperlinks, etc.
I have downloaded GhostWORD and have used it succesfully to switch on and off the pdf with Hidden Hyper Links, etc. This is great.. However.. what is the ghostscript parameter to switch this on and off, as i have written my own module, and would rather use this than ghostword. Any help would be greatly appreciated ! Thanks Mark Wakelin
AFAIK there is no simple way of switching pdfmarks on and off from ghostscript, although if you redefine the pdfmark operator to empty with something like this: globaldict begin /pdfmark /cleartomark load def end You might be able to get rid of all pdfmark operations (internal cross-references, etc at toc's or indices, hyperlinks). This bug is invalid, I gather?
The original bug is invalid, so I guess now it's a support request. :-) Mark, you might also look at PrimoPDF.com, which has document converter built on top of Ghostscript. It's a free (AFPL) download as an advertisement for their advanced and server products, and will probably do a better job than any custom thing we could hack together. I'll leave it at that.