
It has never happened to me if the document was properly prepared for the proper distribution, aka PDF. Did you ever get sent a Word document that was supposed to be on one page and when you opened it up on your computer it spilled out over multiple pages and nothing was aligned? Happens to me all the time. Ironically it was the IRS that did the big push on PDF because their forms were very tight in the space that filled a page. Keep in mind that before the PDF, when someone created a document in Word Perfect and used a unique font and sent that out to everyone, what other people opened up would be a mess. (It was a large document which needed to be be easy to navigate in paper form as well as digital). It took a very labour intensive hour or so to type it up, check it then add the table manually to the pdf. But Acrobat is a content distribution application so that after you have your content created you can distribute it safely into many many hands as a PDF. These can't be exported to Word for a contents table top be added, then saved as a PDF. Yes, TOC is very basic task that any reasonably good content creator should be able to do.

I have created a small document as an example, you can.

Now start applying styles to headings and sub headings according to its level. If you want to change the style of an individual hyperlink, select it.

I think the thing you are confusing is content creation versus content distribution. Now insert table of contents, Click on References tab and then Table of Contents, right click on predefined Automatic table of contents option and then select suitable option like Insert at Beginning of Document. Important Note: These steps apply to all the hyperlinks in your Word document.
