pdfTeX warning: has been referenced but does not exist, replaced by a fixed one, with German Umlaut

Question

I'm new to LaTeX, and have been given a LaTeX draft for writing a thesis. Everything works fine except for this warning:

see the transcript file for additional information)pdfTeX warning (dest): name{ehrenw\366rtliche\040erkl\344rung.1} has been referenced but does not exist, replaced by a fixed one

Here is the position in the code:

\refstepcounter{dummy}  
\pdfbookmark[1]{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}{ehrenwörtliche erklärung}  
\chapter*{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}  
\thispagestyle{empty}`

When I don't use German Umlauts(ä,ö,ü), i.e.

\pdfbookmark[1]{Ehrenwoertliche Erklaerung}{ehrenwoertliche erklaerung}

it works fine! I don't get any warnings and the link works.

I've been Googling for 2 weeks for similar warnings, and trying things out but none worked. Any one with similar experience or ideas how to get this fixed.

I'm using MAC 10.8 with MacTeX-2012

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem, but I've "solved" it.

Online some people seemed to suggest this is to do with hyperref, but, I'm not convinced. Loading hyperref last had no effect whatsoever.

In the .tex file I had:

\begin{proposition}\label{prop:amG delta in amG delta K}
\begin{enumerate}
\item

This formats so that the 1. of the \item is right next to the "Proposition 3.6" header.

My log file told me:

pdfTeX warning (dest): name{theorem.3.6} has been referenced but does not exist
, replaced by a fixed one

Then, I inserted some space like this:

\begin{proposition}\label{prop:amG delta in amG delta K}
\hspace{2em}
\begin{enumerate}
\item

Now of course the 1. of the \item is below, not next to, the "Proposition 3.6" header, but also, miraculously, the referencing problem is solved!

Don't ask me why, though.

Answer 2

Load the bookmark package:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}% http://ctan.org/pkg/inputenc
\usepackage{hyperref}% http://ctan.org/pkg/hyperref
\usepackage{bookmark}% http://ctan.org/pkg/bookmark
\begin{document}
\pdfbookmark[1]{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}{ehrenwörtliche erklärung}
\chapter*{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung} 
\thispagestyle{empty}
\end{document}

Answer 3

I've had a similar problem too, which appears to be related to Poeh's one. I referenced an environment without content

\begin{env}[foo]\label{env:foo}
\end{env}

which produced the following error message

pdfTeX warning (dest): name{env.#} has been referenced but does not exist, replaced by a fixed one

(# denotes the reference number). Apparently, pdfTeX correctly processes an environment only if it has some effective content (besides its name, here: foo). In Poeh's case the content is indeed \hspace{2em} since pdfTeX restarts processing environment contents for each subenvironment (that's why \begin{enumerate} is not sufficient to trigger pdfTeX correct response).

If you didn't change anything else besides the Umlauts, then I suspect the warning message might be caused by a wrongful interaction between pdfTeX and hyperref as suggested above. As you can see in the warning, Umlauts are not correctly interpreted (nor, for sure, they are by hyperref, which also does not interpret math symbols, occasionally prompting warnings such as Package hyperref Warning: Token not allowed in a PDF string (Unicode):(hyperref) removing '\mathgroup' on input line 58.).

This issue is much more difficult to deal with, but, since you are under Mac OS, I'd suggest to change your encoding settings to applemac (rather than UTF8, Unicode or anything else).

Answer 4

The quite expensive support of umlauts and other stuff is done for bookmark titles only. Anchor names do not support as many features. Usually they are just simple names and should not contain non-ASCII stuff.

Depending on the input and font encodings, the code can even break, e.g. by using utf8 with OT1.

The anchor names are used as internal unique names in the PDF file. The anchor names are only seen by the outside, if referenced. Then umlauts would cause much additional trouble: Unknown encoding, quoting requirements, ...

Therefore your workaround is the best solution here, replacing umlauts by ASCII letters (ä → ae, ...). Also something shorter could be used here:

\pdfbookmark[1]{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}{Erklaerung}

Since \pdfbookmark already creates an anchor, it is not necessary to add \phantomsection or \refstepcounter{dummy}. It is more important that the anchor setting is done at the correct place and especially page:

\cleardoublepage
\pdfbookmark[1]{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}{Erklaerung}
\chapter*{Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung}

Answer 5

I got the same problem/warning on my document, and it was caused because I was trying to fix this other warning: How to fix destination with the same identifier (name{page.A}) has been already used, duplicate ignored?

I had added \hypersetup{pageanchor=false} around my whole thesis before text. And this was disabling all anchors inside those pages and any one trying to link with something there was throwing the error: pdfTeX warning (dest): name{page.11} has been referenced but does not exist, replaced by a fixed one

The fix was to add \hypersetup{pageanchor=false} only around the pages which ware actually throwing the warning destination with the same identifier (name{page.1}) has been already used, duplicate ignored

Related:

1. ClassicThesis and acronym warnings: "has been referenced but does not exist, replaced by a fixed one"
2. "Reference does not exist" warning with \includeonly
3. Warning with footnotes: "name{Hfootnote.xx} has been referenced but does not exist"