single Word file prints as two documents

[Denis Pelli]

There is a bug in Microsoft Word (all Macintosh versions tested) that
makes certain documents tricky to print to PDF, e.g.
<http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/docs/WordMultiplePrintBug.doc>. For
unknown reasons, all versions of Word print this document in two
parts.

If you ask Word to create a PDF of the whole document (by printing to
Adobe PDF or by clicking Save as PDF in the Print Dialog box), Word
treats the two parts as separate documents, and creates a PDF for page
1, and another PDF for page 2. This wouldn't be so bad except that the
Adobe PDF "printer" saves both files with the same name, so the second
one silently replaces the first. Save as PDF is somewhat better
behaved and automatically saves the two files with different names.

We're using the latest: Microsoft Word 2004 (version 11.1) and Mac OS
X 10.3.6.

Does anyone understand why this happens, or how to prevent it?

Denis Pelli
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU
http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Denis,

This phenomenon has been noted when there is a Section Break in the Word
document. Is that the case here?

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***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Denis Pelli]

dear beth

yes, there is a section break. i suppose that it's corrupted.

best

denis

 

[JE McGimpsey]

yes, there is a section break. i suppose that it's corrupted.

No, it's not necessarily corruption. AFAICT, only section breaks that
change Page settings (e.g., margins, orientation) cause the split. This
was never a problem before Print to PDF, since it didn't matter how many
print jobs were sent to a hard-copy printer. It *does* matter,
obviously, with saving to pdf.

I have Acrobat, so I use that to recombine the files. versiontracker
lists a few highly rated freeware PDF joiners (joinPDF, PDFLab, and
Combine PDFs)

http://versiontracker.com/

 

[Rob Daly [MSFT]]

Yep,

This is a notorious issue with the way in which Apple's print APIs deal with
a print job sent in multiple pieces. This is the only way that word can send
a job that contains section breaks that have different page setups. Word
stores a separate page setup for each section (next page). These are sent as
separate jobs when being passed to PDF. As of yet, Apple has not provided a
way to join those jobs on the fly and it is unknown when/if they will.

John's suggestions about using a joiner is probably the best option as
things stand now,

Hope this helps.

Rob Daly
Macintosh Business Unit
Word Test

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