nsmcc said:
Drat! I totally forgot to mention that I was messing around with the
first section break that was giving me trouble (there were three in the
first portion of the document that did not), checking all the
formatting I could, and looking for an extra page break, etc.
Now the document breaks *AT DIFFERENT SPOTS* than before.
The original trouble spot, between page 11 and 12, no longer breaks,
but all of a sudden the document breaks at page 6. Which section break
I did not even mess with, as far as I know.
Fascinating.
Yeah, we did hang a bit of fun off the back of your query didn't we?
You seem to have got to the point where you can see that section breaks
are quite useful, but rather fragile.
You might find that strictly observing styles and avoiding touching any
margin settings for any reason might let your document last longer
before the PDFs print in fragments. But then again, you might not.
I have got to the next stage where the PDF stitcher I use is so
painless that I cease to worry. I use PDF a lot when exchanging docs by
mail with colleagues. It is the only way they get to see what it was
like before Word repaginates it for their computer. That way I can have
a phone conversation about the "second paragraph on page 233" without
too much hilarity.
The other use I have for the stitcher is when producing two-up double
sided booklets on my single-sider laser printer. (A feeble attempt to
save the planet, pine forests, time and money) Word makes a royal mess
of those when section breaks intrude. My workflow is to produce the doc
in Word, print to postscript with OS X (I'm getting in another dig at
Word's idiotic behavior of printing low-res previews of eps diagrams to
PDF and leaving the vecor art on the cutting room floor), convert the
Postscript to PDF in Preview for each of the fragments. Stitch the PDFs
togather with PDFLab, hand the resulting file to Cheapimposter, which
manages the imposition tasks of working out which pages are on the back
of which other ones, allowing for gutters, scaling the pages and stuff.
It gives me two PDFs, one even pages, one odds reversed, which I print
with a little shove-the-output-back-in-the-in-tray dance in between.
My point in telling you this is twofold. First to say it is actually
quite easy to do all this. The results are OK, so you don't need to
feel foolish as you do it. Well, at least you know you have foolish
company.
The second, is in case those who look after Word are visiting.
Here comes a rant.
Why Oh Why do you force all this on users? Surely PDF production with
section breaks and eps illustrations and at least 2-up imposition is
among the *primary* tasks of a word processor in the internet age.
Surely an option to lock the pagination on e-mailed Word documents is
seen as worthwhile?
Yet we have gone through two or three versions of Word where this is
getting worse, not better. Instead we get more and more silly childish
clip art, and an increasing fragility with respect to document margins
and printing services. The moment anyone sees Word clip-art in a
document, is the moment they think "Bozo!". Leave it out and
concentrate on word processing. Insert picture from file without
messing it up is all the graphics anyone needs, but Word can't even do
that without introducing massive cross-platform fragility.
Blaming it on Apple's print services or Quicktime is simply not an
option. Not when you are the only one out of step.
I really hate having to optically reduce my fonts when going 2-up, yet
there is no other way I can do it. For proper finished work I end up
pouring the text into InDesign. Every time I do that, I ask myself why
I bother with Word at all. I should be able to do 2-up straight from
Word but there is no way to do 2-up without optical reduction.
So how about it? A little less time on ribbons for thwarting the Apple
Human Interface Guidelines, a lot less time on clip art, and a bit of
effort in getting the bugs out of PDF and margins and getting section
breaks working as well as they did in Word 5.1a?
Happy now Clive? Normal service has been resumed.
