Changing text (not page) orientation in Word 2007 from Landscape t

[Jerry Phillips]

I am using Word 2007 and Acrobat 7. In Acrobat, I saved a 250 page pdf file,
which had been recognized in Adobe using OCR, as a Word file. When I open
this now 178 page file in word, the first two pages are in portrait
orientation, but the remaining are in landscape orientation. I change the
orientation of all the pages in the word document to portrait, and the paper
orientation changes, but the text orientation does not. That is, the text
still runs parallel to the left hand margin, instead of the bottom margin of
the paper, and I cannot seem to change it.

My question is, what attribute controls the orientation of the text on a
page. The portrait/landscape attribute seems to control the orientation of
the paper. How do I rotate the test 90 degrees?

Thanks.

Jerry Phillips
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jay Freedman]

If the text was just ordinary text, then the page orientation setting
would control it.

However, a favorite trick of OCR programs, in an attempt to maintain
absolute position on the page, is to put the recognized text into a
text box. If that's the case, the text direction of the text box could
be set independently of the page orientation.

When you click on the text, do you see a hatched border around it, and
does the Text Box toolbar appear? If so, use the Text Direction button
on the toolbar to rotate the text. And if that works, you'll probably
need a macro to rotate all the text boxes in the document instead of
changing them individually.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:26:00 -0700, Jerry Phillips <Jerry

 

[Jerry Phillips]

Thanks, Jay. This sounds like it should be the problem, but the text is not
in text boxes. There are no outlines, and it I go to the Page Layout tab, in
the arrange section of the ribbon Rotate is greyed out, suggesting that the
text is not part of an object.

As a clumsy kludge, I can go to the View tab, select Draft in Documet Views,
select all with control - keypad 5, copy, and paste into a new document. I
lose images that are in the text, however, among other things.

There must be something that sets the text orientation, and if such a
setting exists, I hope it is accessable to the user.

Jerry Phillips

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think what you have is a bunch of graphics, presumably In Line With Text.
In order to rotate a graphic, you must change its wrapping to some other
style. Alternatively, you can insert section breaks and change the
orientation of the paper to match the orientation of the graphic.

 

[Jerry Phillips]

Thanks, Suzanne, but the graphics are objects, surrounded by dotted lines,
which can be easily rotated.

As far as I can tell, the text is plain vanilla Microsoft Word text; I can
select text, change the font, insert new text, do everything I can always do
with text in Word, except change its orientation from parallel to the left
margin to parallet to the bottom margin.

Jerry Phillips

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Okay, I hadn't followed the previous part of the thread and thought perhaps
the text had been scanned but not OCR'd. I also missed that this is in Word
2007, which may have new bells and whistles that would affect this, but in
Word 2003 and earlier, text can be rotated only in tables, text boxes, and
frames. Are you displaying text boundaries? If not, it may not be obvious
that text is in a frame (since you can see it in Normal/Draft view), though
earlier versions would show a hashed border when text in the frame was
selected.

 

[Jerry Phillips]

Suzanne,

Your post gave me an idea. Since I have a large hard disk and probably have
a squirrel somewhere in my genetic tree, I keep old versions of Microsoft
Office loaded on it. I opened the .doc file created by Acrobat 7 in Word 97,
and sure enough, everything was formatted properly, text flowing from left to
right, illustrations in the appropriate places.

I still would love to know how to control the orientation of text in Word
2007, if that is possible.

Jerry Phillips