Preventing a document from repaginating when changing printer

[Cris Moore]

I am preparing long documents which will primarily be
viewed on screen. Is there a way to stop Word altering
the page endings etc when someone with a different
printer opens the document.

I remember an option in WordPerfect years ago which when
turned on stopped a document reformatting to a different
printer.

Any ideas?

 

[Margaret Aldis]

Hi Chris

The simple answer is 'no, Word works like this'. That is, Word is a word
processor (not a page makeup tool) and it will reflow text to suit the
current content and printer.

One solution would be to create PDF versions of the documents. These will
display cleanly and without changing pagingation. (Though note that creating
the PostScript or PDF output does itself involve a printer driver, so be
sure you check pagination for that device.)

Alternatively, you can minimise the practical problems of the appearence on
the screen by choosing commonly available TrueType fonts and by using page
breaking rules (that is, the paragraph page and line break settings, *not*
manual page breaks) to control pagination and make the page breaks occur in
sensible places.

You should also check your compatibility settings to make sure you do not
have 'user printer metrics' checked.

Hope this helps