I carefully set up a new table, with one bookmark in each cell. It looked like this on screen:


Then I saved the document to .pdf, and Word had a sudden fit of creativity … new formatting, plus text I hadn't even typed in.

It looks like you have some form of cross-referencing to the heading above the table. What do you see when you press Alt-F9?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for the diagnostic tip. Most of the fields show up as
Some of them don't have the MERGEFORMAT switch

The targets are defined using bookmarks.

The context is a level 2 heading, which is bookmarked, followed by a body text paragraph (which isn't) and then the table. The table cells are supposed to contain nothing cross-references (as in the "good" screenshot). Each cross-reference points to a bookmarked piece of body text, which is followed by a short body paragraph and then a "back to the overview table" cross-reference: this uses the bookmarked level 2 heading.

For the wider issue, I can of course recreate all the cross-references as hyperlinks … but my mental model from other programs uses "cross-reference" for links within a document/book and "hyperlink" for links to external files and web addresses.

If your table cells are not supposed to contain cross-references, the simple solution is to delete them.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

The underlying question remains, what happened to take me from the "good" screenshot to the "bad"?

The change was that your cross-references updated to display their contents. Your initial post refers to the insertion of bookmarks, but it looks like what you really inserted was cross-references that hadn't been updated after you added the 'menu tree at a glance' text.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I think I'll just take extra care whebever I have to update an inherited document …