I've been looking into this issue and having trouble understanding how to manage my coding.
I'm working in a geodatabase with relative paths and was able to rework a VBScript code to work with my first shapefile. So I have two columns in my attributes table and when I select to activate the hyperlinks and hit a point - one image file (Data_Hyper) and one pdf file (Data_TOC) open at the same time:
I have to send this to a client so I don't want any script to be dependent on a version of adobe either (I've seen that written into some codes).
Thank you!
Beware that with new versions of Edge and Chrome the file:// option is no no longer implemented. Solution is to place the pdfs on a web server and use http:// or https:// file paths to the PDF.