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
    2013-11-29T19:46:55+00:00

    November 2013. Still an issue.

    Use an iMac and I am formatting a book for CreateSpace which requires section breaks to get the page numbering to appear correctly between the Front Matter and Contents of the book. I was using Word on Windows 7 via Vmware Fusion but started having problems and switched to Office 2011 for MAC. Although the MAC version of Word has more functionality than the Apple Pages app, I also have this section break/blank page issue with Word when printing to a pdf.

    What Happens

    At the end of text on a page, I add a section break and then text on the next page - which should be the first page of the new section. The headers and footer all report this is Section 2 and it is set to NOT LINK TO PREVIOUS (that checkmark is removed). So when printing or saving as PDF you would expect to see a page with text at the end of Section 1 and then the next page would be the text with Section 2. Not so. Instead there is a blank page between Section 1 and 2.

    Example

    This is how it appears in Word:

    page 1 text

    page 1 text

    page 1 text

    [SECTION BREAK]

    page 2 text

    page 2 text

    This is how it appears in the resulting PDF:

    page 1 text

    page 1 text

    page 1 text

    [SECTION BREAK]

    BLANK PAGE

    page 3 text

    page 3 text

    Work Arounds Attempted

    There are 4 types of Section Breaks; Next Page, Continuous, Odd Page, Even Page. I have tried combinations of all including a normal page break with the Continuous section break. The only thing that seems to work is using the Even Page Section Break. This does eliminate the blank page. However, the page numbering is screwed up for the new section 2. The page number on the new section 2 shows it as page 2 even though the numbering is set to begin at page 1. I tried fooling it by setting the starting number to 0 but then the page actually sets itself to and displays a zero; even though when set to start at 1, the page displays the number 2.

    It's all very strange and disappointing but if there is another thread that fixes this then please advise.

    tx, h mark

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-08-25T16:53:25+00:00

    It is Aug. 2013 and this issue is still occurring....yet another reason why people do not want to convert to MAC....so probably why microsoft will not fix...wished they would play nice so all users could use both systems!

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