Issues printing and saving as PDF

[deeper]

Hi all,

I've stumbled across a weird problem under Office 2004 and my mac.
The majority of my documents make use of various page layouts
throughout the document (standard and landscape)

the issue is that when i goto do a print, save as pdf, it creates 3/4
pdf's instead of one. It seems to make 1 pdf for all the standard pages
and then seperate ones for the pages which are landscape.
Printing is the same issue, it sends of 4 print jobs for the 1
document.

I have no idea why its doing this, the same document under windows
works as expected

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi all,

I've stumbled across a weird problem under Office 2004 and my mac.
The majority of my documents make use of various page layouts
throughout the document (standard and landscape)

the issue is that when i goto do a print, save as pdf, it creates 3/4
pdf's instead of one. It seems to make 1 pdf for all the standard pages
and then seperate ones for the pages which are landscape.
Printing is the same issue, it sends of 4 print jobs for the 1
document.

I have no idea why its doing this, the same document under windows
works as expected

Any help would be greatly appreciated

This is a famous misfeature. It is unclear who deserves the blame.
Try googling the group for "PDF section" or similar.
Any section break in the Word that changes the margins will start a new
PDF or print job.
Your only recourse is to stitch the PDFs together again with one of the
shareware-ish things out there. Have a look on versiontracker.com
Or, if you have the full Acrobat, and can wade through its interface...

 

[Oz Springs]

I had this problem with a file and was able to fix it but I can¹t remember
what I did! I think I put a paragraph mark somewhere within the breaking
page section, to separate the page break and the section mark. I was using
continuous sections because there were problems with deleting a new page
section so if you are using new page sections (which is likely since you are
using both portrait and landscape layouts) then maybe my solution won¹t work
for you.

I hope I¹ve kept a problem file, but maybe I deleted them all.

(also, who is to blame if Acrobat thinks that there¹s a new document because
a paragraph mark is needed? Microsoft or Adobe?)

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Oz:

The cause of this is a change in "Document Level" properties: usually
margins, but it can be headers, footers, orientation or paper size.

Word will handle such a change in a single file, by inserting a section
break and then the new properties.

As Elliott notes: when this arrives in the Mac printing subsystem for
printing, Mac OS X makes multiple files out of it, one for each set of
document-level properties.

The easiest way to fix it is to ensure that your document contains only one
section break. Unfortunately, that's not an available strategy if you are
using both portrait and landscape pages.

Most users have more section breaks than they need in a document. I have a
whole book of 23 chapters done with a single section break, but it contains
no landscape pages. Using Automatic Blank Pages (see
http://www.word.mvps.org/faqs/tblsfldsfms/InsEvnPgEndChap.htm) and StyleRef
fields (see the Word Help) you rarely need section breaks.

Since the reported problem is only one of a few issues you can get with
section breaks, our advise is to use as few as you can. It's a bit like
driving, you "can" exceed the speed limit, but if you do, eventually it will
cost ya!!.

Cheers

I had this problem with a file and was able to fix it but I can¹t remember
what I did! I think I put a paragraph mark somewhere within the breaking
page section, to separate the page break and the section mark. I was using
continuous sections because there were problems with deleting a new page
section so if you are using new page sections (which is likely since you are
using both portrait and landscape layouts) then maybe my solution won¹t work
for you.

I hope I¹ve kept a problem file, but maybe I deleted them all.

(also, who is to blame if Acrobat thinks that there¹s a new document because
a paragraph mark is needed? Microsoft or Adobe?)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410