Hi Lofty:
That's a "hardy perennial" in Word, but your post is the first report I have
seen in Mac Word for a very long while
One "cure" is to set "Reverse Print Order" in your printer driver.
What is happening is that the { NUMPAGES } field is populated by the
pagination engine. If you allow the document to print "forwards", the
printing subsystem sends the page images to the printer as soon as they are
ready (i.e. As soon as the pagination engine has finished making each page
up).
At that stage, the value of the NUMPAGES field is equal to the PAGE field on
the same page, because the pagination engine hasn't got any further down the
file.
By forcing the printer to print in reverse order, you force the printing
subsystem to wait for the entire file to paginate before sending the first
sheet (which is the last page) to the printer. By that time, Word knows how
many pages there are in the file, and the NUMPAGES field has the correct
value.
The reappearance of this bug indicates that your machine may be struggling
for memory. Pagination should complete at around 50 to 100 pages a second,
which is a bit faster than the printer can swallow them. Try stopping a few
other heavyweight applications before printing, and see if that makes a
difference.
If you can't quit applications, and the Budget Police won't spring for
another stick of memory, you CAN replace the { NUMPAGES } field with a
cross-reference to only the "Page Number" of a "LastPage" bookmark. Hide
the last page bookmark somewhere on the last page where a user won't delete
it by accident.
This effectively forces Word to complete pagination, in order to return a
value for the cross reference, before it can send the first page to the
printer. That way you get the same effect, but the paper comes out the
right way up.
Hope this helps
Frequently when I print a document that has in the header
[page] of [total pages]
The [total pages] gets updated one by one, so I get page 1 of 1, page 2
of 2 ... page 49 of 49, page 50 of 50.
I'm sure there's a switch I can throw somewhere that will force the
update before I print. Before I search through all the preferences, does
anyone know where it is?
Thanks in advance
-Lofty
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