printing a single section: problem with unwanted blank page

[Chip Orange]

Hi all,

We have a document which is over 300 pages in length. It's divided up into
many small Word sections. Many of these begin a new chapter, and so have a
"section break odd page".

When we print we duplex this document. We often have a need to update a
single section, and then instruct our users to reprint this section only,
and reinsert it into their copy of the manual.

The problem is that when printing duplex, a section with the section break
odd page, will throw an extra blank page to honor it's "odd page"
designation, and this blank page ends up being on the other side of the
first page of the section.

I've tried changing the section break type to new page, and I've tried
adding a page break to the main document just before the break, to try and
force the section in question to start on an even page. (all being done in
vba by intercepting the file print command)

Nothing is working and these sections, when printed in isolation, are still
throwing an extra blank page, and making it impossible to update just a
section of the manual.

Anyone have any ideas?

This is word 2003.

thanks.

Chip

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hello Chip

We have a document which is over 300 pages in length. It's divided up into
many small Word sections. Many of these begin a new chapter, and so have a
"section break odd page".

*before* it, right?

When we print we duplex this document. We often have a need to update a
single section, and then instruct our users to reprint this section only,
and reinsert it into their copy of the manual.

The problem is that when printing duplex, a section with the section break
odd page, will throw an extra blank page to honor it's "odd page"
designation, and this blank page ends up being on the other side of the
first page of the section.

how exactly are the users printing the individual section(s)? Entering
"s9" (without the apostrophes) in the "Print what" dialog to print
section 9 would be my desired approach. If the printer is set to duplex,
and the page is indeed an odd page (what does the PAGE field show on
this page), then it's certainly not what should happen that the printer
spits out an empty page on the back of the starting page.

Could you print a section into, say, a PDF and see whether

a) the PDF has a blank page somwhere, or
b) it prints in the same way as the DOC file?

I'm not aware of any build-in "anomaly" in Word like this (FWIW, of course).

Greetinx
Robert

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This actually does happen quite often, I gather. Unfortunately, when you use
an Odd Page break, Word regards the blank even page it inserts as the first
page of the section. Another problem that this causes is an incorrect Y for
Page X of Y fields in sections that restart numbering (the blank page is
counted even though it's not numbered).

Would printing in reverse order help?

 

[Chip Orange]

Thanks for the reply Robert.

Yes, the odd page break is before the section/chapter, and yes, when
printing to a file the very first page is blank.

The completely inexplicable thing is that even when I change the page break
type to just "page break new page", by intercepting the FilePrint command
and doing this "on the fly" before the print job, we *still* get the extra
blank page. There is *absolute no reason* for Word to throw a blank page
here, as I've changed the section break type, and I used the "repaginate"
method to cause the document to recalculate it's pagination, before the job
goes on to print.

Yes, the section is designated for printing with the "s123-S123" format,
which I do in the FilePrint intercept by populating this field of the dialog
before displaying it to the user, based on the user's current selection
pointer position. This gives them the opportunity to change the sections to
be printed if they want more than one, but keeps them from having to know
and remember the correct Word section number.

Suzanne, I'll have a look to see if reverse printing has any effect, but it
might result in paper copies with pages inserted in reverse order!

I guess I was wondering if I was doing anything obviously wrong.

thanks for both of your responses.

Chip