Advice for re-doing an old Word file

[NALC]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone out there can help me with some good advice. We do some work with a government agency, and have so many different forms and files to reference that a while back, we created an index of all of them with hyperlinks to the PDFs of the forms and reports. We started off using an older version of Word, because it was the only publishing software we had that allowed hyperlinks, and would keep the hyperlinks as we turned it into its own PDF document. But over the years (not surprising for a government agency), this index has grown to over 400 pages by itself, full of links. But because it has gotten so large and unweildy, half the time I try to turn it into a PDF, it crashes my whole computer on me and I have to go back and try again. So we're wondering if anybody has any suggestions for Word to make it work better through the conversion process, or to suggest another piece of software that might work better for such a giant document.

Some things to bear in mind that we would need in any new program:

• -- We use style sheet headings to automatically create bookmarks within the PDF document.
  -- It needs to create a 3-page index for the 400-page index, with links to the pages in the 400-page index.
  -- We have some hiden text within the document, because there are some files and information that only certain people are allowed to see.
  

We've been wracking our brains to see if we could use Quark or InDesign for this, but the experts we talked to said no. And now we're thinking that we might want to just recreate the whole thing as a web site rather than a PDF.

Anyway, any advice would be very welcome.

Thanks,

Mike