Italic index entries have no link in PDF

Question

I have a problem when adding index entries. When I use just the vanilla \index{...}, the generated PDF contains links on the page numbers in the index. But when using \index{...|textit} to mark index entries as primary entries, these links disappear. The same happens when I use textbf instead of textit.

I looked through the documentation of makeidx and hyperref, but didn't find any reference to that problem there.

Here is a minimal example. I used latexmk -pdf:

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage{hyperref} 
\usepackage{makeidx}
\makeindex
\begin{document}
Text. \index{normal} \index{bold|textbf} \index{italic|textit}
\printindex
\end{document}

This is my TeX version:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 
(TeX Live 2009/Debian) (format=pdflatex 2011.5.25)

Answer 1

OK, I found the solution. When looking at the .ind file produced by makeindex, the entries looked like this:

\begin{theindex}
  \item Principal entry, \textit{14}
  \indexspace
  \item Normal entry, \hyperpage{30}
\end{theindex}

This was because I used \index{Principal entry|textit} in my file. I solved it by defining a command that uses textit and hyperpage:

\newcommand{\boldindex}[1]{\textit{\hyperpage{#1}}}

And then using \index{Principal entry|boldindex} to index terms.

This is even explained in the README file of the hyperref package, http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/.