Exasperating mis-alignment

[Terry Pinnell]

Here we go with yet another of the exasperating Word 2000 problems my
wife seems to get just about every weekend, while preparing to teach
lessons for the coming week.

This time it's an apparently trivial issue that has us both baffled.
What should have been an hour's work has now become indefinite! In
some cells of a table there is a word of text centred vertically in
the cell. These look fine in both the Word document itself and in
Print Preview, as shown here (with paragraph marks etc displayed, in
case that offers any clues):
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/Word+Preview.gif

Yet when we print it, the text is displaced up to the top of the cell,
as shown in this scan of part of it (b/w to save ink):
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/Printed.gif

What can be causing this and how can we fix it please? She has 8 such
pages to complete by tomorrow morning, and all suffer from the same
problem ;-(

 

[Beth Melton]

If the document looks correct both on the screen and in Print Preview
then the first item to rule out is a corrupt printer driver. Obtain an
updated driver from the manufacturer's web site and see if that
resolves it

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Terry Pinnell]

FWIW, even if the text is given a vertical alignment within the cell
of 'Bottom Center', it still prints at the top.

The only way we've found of forcing it towards the centre is by adding
a paragraph mark above it.

This table was made by first copying an identical size table (3 cols x
6 rows) from an earlier one, which had a similar mixture of text and
'floating' graphics in its cells, and entering new content. Both
*look* identical in all formatting respects. Yet that one printed the
text correctly in the middle.

Bizarre.

 

[Beth Melton]

I'd say it has to do with the mix of graphics and text. If you want to
email it to me I'll take a look and see if I can determine the exact
cause. Remove "NoSpam4Me" to obtain a valid email address.

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Terry Pinnell]

I'd say it has to do with the mix of graphics and text. If you want to
email it to me I'll take a look and see if I can determine the exact
cause. Remove "NoSpam4Me" to obtain a valid email address.

Great - thanks, Beth.

I've emailed the 275 KB file ADI.doc as an attachment. It's also
posted here temporarily.
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Misc/ADI.doc

However, be warned that there seems to be something very odd about
this file. Whenever I try to Save As, even before doing *anything* to
it, I get that 'Word has done bad; send a report to MS' message.
Oddly, my wife doesn't appear to get that message on her PC (also XP).
I got the file fro her via floppy , so I find this an additional
mystery!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you opened the file directly from the floppy, it may well be corrupted.
Have you tried the Open and Repair route? Or treating the document as
corrupt and trying some of the fixes described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm?

 

[Terry Pinnell]

If you opened the file directly from the floppy, it may well be corrupted.
Have you tried the Open and Repair route? Or treating the document as
corrupt and trying some of the fixes described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm?

Thanks Suzanne. No, I haven't, but will do so tomorrow.

Copied from floppy to my HD, and opened from latter.

 

[Beth Melton]

Hi Terry,

It does look like there is a conflict in the table and the graphics.
When you print a document it may not print precisely as it appears on
screen since some printers may print slightly larger than others and
in this case, some of the graphics are printing a little larger than
they appear on the screen.

From what I can ascertain, the fact that the rows are set to an exact
height is what is causing the problem. Believe it or not, the
vertical alignment is actually being presented in the printed copy but
since the rows are confined to an exact height the row height is not
allowed to change in order to compensate so the text ends up appearing
at the top of the cell.

If you select a row that exhibits the behavior, such as the first row,
go to Table/Table Properties/Row and set the Row Height to "At least"
you'll find it will print correctly.

btw, the document you posted does have some damage in the binary and
unfortunately it can not be fixed in Word 2000. It will open but it is
unstable and Word will likely crash on you at some point.

I'd say this was caused by working directly off the floppy as Suzanne
noted. Specifically, I suspect it was caused by copy/pasting some of
the graphics. Word can utilize temp files for copy/pasted graphics and
the temp files will be placed in the same location as the document. If
the floppy was ejected too soon, i.e. before closing the document and
occasionally before exiting Word, and if Word is unable to clean up
the temp files and update the document with data stored in the temp
files then the internal pointers to the graphics in the binary can
become corrupt.

I have Word 2003 and used the "Open and Repair" function so I can
email it to you if you no longer have a good copy - just let me know.
--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Hi Terry,

It does look like there is a conflict in the table and the graphics.
When you print a document it may not print precisely as it appears on
screen since some printers may print slightly larger than others and
in this case, some of the graphics are printing a little larger than
they appear on the screen.

From what I can ascertain, the fact that the rows are set to an exact
height is what is causing the problem. Believe it or not, the
vertical alignment is actually being presented in the printed copy but
since the rows are confined to an exact height the row height is not
allowed to change in order to compensate so the text ends up appearing
at the top of the cell.

If you select a row that exhibits the behavior, such as the first row,
go to Table/Table Properties/Row and set the Row Height to "At least"
you'll find it will print correctly.

Beth:

Brilliant! Thanks very much. I don't think I'd have got around to
looking at row height settings as a cause. Not in the required
timescale anyway! (Although, I do now recall hitting broadly similar
problems sometimes when creating HTML tables on web pages).

btw, the document you posted does have some damage in the binary and
unfortunately it can not be fixed in Word 2000. It will open but it is
unstable and Word will likely crash on you at some point.

I'd say this was caused by working directly off the floppy as Suzanne
noted. Specifically, I suspect it was caused by copy/pasting some of
the graphics. Word can utilize temp files for copy/pasted graphics and
the temp files will be placed in the same location as the document. If
the floppy was ejected too soon, i.e. before closing the document and
occasionally before exiting Word, and if Word is unable to clean up
the temp files and update the document with data stored in the temp
files then the internal pointers to the graphics in the binary can
become corrupt.

I have Word 2003 and used the "Open and Repair" function so I can
email it to you if you no longer have a good copy - just let me know.

It certainly does seem to implicate the floppy copy. However, that was
simply used as a route to pass it from my wife's HD to mine. Neither
of us actually worked in Word directly with the floppy file.

BTW, that transferred doc file was causing Word to crash repeatedly
even while in the background while I worked in other applications!
(For example, I loaded it again first thing this morning. When I
returned here after breakfast a few minutes ago, my screen was
displaying the familiar message about Word sending MS its apologies
for crashing.)

One way that seemed to create a clean version was to open a new doc
and paste each of the 8 pages into it. (Oddly, that gave 248 KB versus
the original 275 KB.)

But I also then successfully used a CD (RW i.e. UDF format, with Nero
inCD) to transfer another copy of the original problem file. That
seems stable. So we'll have to avoid floppies in future!

Thanks again for your much appreciated help.