word to pdf creation: problem with section and page breaks

Anonymous
2012-07-16T19:44:45+00:00

I had posted this question about a month ago, but wasn't able to follow up due to time constraints.  My apologies to those who were trying to assist.  It was suggested that I begin anew to try to clarify the details of the problem(s).  A general statement of the problem is that section breaks in a Word (Word for Mac 2011, v 14.2.3) document introduce aberrations in the pdf created from that document via a “save as…pdf command.  I am running OS X, 10.7.4 on a MacBookPro, mid 2009 vintage. 

I am inserting the section break after material on the last page of one layout, when the following page has the opposite layout (portrait vs landscape).  This causes two problems:

1.     Multiple pdfs are created, with a new pdf being created following every section break.

2.     The first page of each new pdf is rendered aberrantly:

a.     When the new pdf begins with a landscape page, the whole page (including header and footer) are “pushed down,” leaving extra space at the top of the page above the header and “loosing” the footer off the bottom of the page.

b.     When the new pdf begins with a portrait page, the whole page (including header and footer) are “pushed right,” leaving an overly wide left hand margin and “loosing” some of the text off the right hand side of the page.

As a work around, I’ve inserted a blank page after every section break in the Word document.  Thus, when I create the pdf there is no text on the aberrantly rendered pages, but the page numbering is incorrect.  I delete the blank pages after “knitting together” the multiple pdfs created. 

I consider this a major glitch in Mac Word 2011, as it makes it a far inferior product to Word for Windows 2010.  It puts me in the amateur lane rather than having a truly professional product for my work.  Is there a fix in the offing?

Thank you so much!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2014-04-17T23:22:38+00:00

I don't know if this will help with your specific issue, but thought I would put this here.

I have a large Word document (Word for Mac 2011) with multiple section breaks, however they are all in portrait.  I've been working off of this document for years.  Over the last month, when I printed to PDF or Preview, the document split into separate files at each section break.  Very frustrating having to piece the files back together, when I never had to do this before!

I just found the solution for my problem though!

Go to Print (Command+P), select Page Setup... (under the preview pane), and set Settings to Microsoft Word as the default.  Mine was set to Page Attributes, which is what causes it to split at the section breaks.

I don't know how my default got changed to Page Attributes, but changing it to Microsoft Word fixed the issue I was having.

Hope this helps someone else.

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Anonymous
2014-04-28T22:20:47+00:00

It didn't work unfortunately, but I have since found a way to combine all of the separate PDFs created together using preview, I just opened them all in separate preview windows, selected the option to show thumbnails making sure the pages were expanded so I could see each page as a thumbnail, then highlighted and dragged and dropped the different pages into the same thumbnail of the 1st PDF in the order that I wanted them to appear! The landscape pages do save properly in this way.

Thanks for your help though :)

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Anonymous
2015-01-31T03:46:35+00:00

Hi All,

The best workaround for this problem is to create the document in Word for Mac then upload it to Online Word at office.live.com (Free Account) and print from the there. Online word creates a PDF document that as no errors.

Cheers,

Humphrey

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-12-04T05:27:03+00:00

    I have EXACTLY the same problem and find it very frustrating also. The problem is absolutely a Word and MacOS problem as has been explained several times in this thread. I have resorted to sending my word docs to a colleague with a PC and getting them to PDF them or print them for me.

    ***Me Too*** in several threads now.

    Worse the problem only began AFTER an update in October. The only problem I have (once I select Borderless printing) is that the job is rendered as a stream per section. If you pause the print queue and print a three section document you will see three separate print jobs.

    I might be dense but I can't see how this has anything at all to do with the OS.

    The problem started recently on a printer I have had for years and continues on a new printer from a different manufacturer.

    Maybe the answer is to remove the patches.

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-12-05T21:02:22+00:00

    <<

    The only problem I have (once I select Borderless printing) is that the job is rendered as a stream per section.

    >>

    The problems this causes, as far as I can tell, is that if your printer is set to "print last page first", you then have to reverse the page sequence of the output for each section in turn, whereas if you select the other print direction, you have to reverse the whole lot. i.e. whatever you choose you have to resequence the output manually, and that is by no means trivial because there's no easy way you can tell where each section begins and ends without printing the section number, which you probably have no reason to do. Probably even worse if you are also printing multiple copies. Either way, a lot of work to compensate for the print behaviour. But maybe

    a. you experience yet more problems related to the split into multiple batches.

    b. you also experience problems that are not related to the split into multiple jobs. Incidentally, here I get a separate job for each layout change rather than for every section, but perhaps that is different for you too.

    That said, here the output does appear to be correct (once I have resequenced it, even if I have a mixture of page sizes. But

    c. borderless print of a page just doesn't work properly here at all. There are certainly no borders if I manage to set everything correctly, but stuff at the edge of the document is cut off. I'm using an HP OfficeJet Pro L7780, recognised as an L7700. It should do borderless A4/A5/A6, but I have to say that

    • I've never tried the borderless settings for anything other than images (i.e. not WP documents)
    • No other WP pages I've tried here gets the borderless thing right either (LibreOffice, Mac Pages)

    d. When I mix paper sizes, Word stops and requests page/print settings for each paper size change.

    If you have the same page size throughout (and that may mean you can't mix bordered/borderless as well as having to avoid A4/A3 mixes), you could try the technique I suggested in the following conversation. I checked it for printing direct to my printer as well as printing to PDF. I'm not sure it works correctly for double-sided printing, but it definitely will not work with mixed paper sizes!

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macword/saving-mixed-layout-documents-as-pdf-again/65f45c2a-6de2-4750-b8a5-d311f9338cd1

    For the mixed page sizes, the other WPs I have tried also seem to have difficulties - Mac Pages can only do a single size and orientation per document anyway. LibreOffice also seems to pop up a dialog for each section with a new paper size.

    > I might be dense but I can't see how this has anything at all to do with the OS.

    The fact that neither Word nor LibreOffice seems to be able to "get it right" suggests that either

    e. the limitation is outside the applications, and no-one could get it right unless they can work around whatever limitation exists in Mac OS X.

    f. it's possible but neither application's developers have got it right yet.

    I don't personally have a strong view as to whether it's (e), (f), or something else I haven't thought of yet, Both of them sound rather unlikely to me. But I do get the impression that programs relies on a Mac OSX printing service that takes over far more than (say) the Windows one does.

    > Maybe the answer is to remove the patches.

    You could be right. I get the impression that Microsoft may have made modifications to try to solve other known problems, but the end result may be worse in some cases.

    At this point, I've done almost everything I can to try to get to the bottom of the various problems that people have described and find some workarounds. The only other thing I can imagine doing in this case is writing Applescript or VBA that outputs each section or chunk as "last page first", starting with the last section/chunk in the document. If anyone thinks there's the slightest chance that that might solve their problem, I can try that, but beyoond that it's over to Microsoft/Apple as far as I'm concerned. And you never know, someone else may come up with some simple work around.

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