Re: OT: Acrobat Problems

On Sep 1, 3:55 am, Martin Brown <|||newspam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
mpm wrote:
This is driving me crazy.
I have a Word Document (Word 97) sized for 5.5"w x 8.5"h.
In other words, letter size, cut in half and rotated 90 degrees.

It displays on-screen and prints just fine from Word on the correct
size paper.
I now want to make a PDF version of this document.
But no matter what I do, I can't seem to get a PDF to "print" at 5.5 x
8.5.

What version of Word? I have seen plenty of weird faults in Word 2007
when using landscape format and unusual (large) paper sizes.

Using Word 2007 I find that several of my Vista printer drivers reset
the paper size from my personal default A4 to US Letter with monotonous
regularity. The worst fault is that sometimes when making small edits to
an old Word 2003 document it not only does this but scrambles the list
of papersizes so that to get A3 paper I have to chose 6x4" from the pull
down menu. Office 2007 is screwed to blazes. It is even funnier that the
correct paper sizes in mm are displayed next to the names. eg
6x4" Postcard (297mm x 420mm)

Bunch of cowboy hackers at MickeySoft are responsible for this junk.



Normally, I would just set the Postscript paper size and be done, but
that doesn't seem to work. ???

Check that selecting one of the other paper sizes doesn't get the right
paper size displayed by the printer driver. There are many faults in the
Word printer interface. What you see is *never* quite what you get (and
in certain cases nothing at all remotely like).



I've tried the PDF Writer for Word (toolbar variety), the full version
of Acrobat 5.0, the Primo PDF printer driver (aka NitroPDF), and some
other PDF writer whose name I can't recall.

I'm beginning to think something is wrong inside Word.(?)

Plenty.
But the exact nature of the faults depends on the version you have.



Has anyone else ever run into this problem?
Surely Acrobat can print a non-standard size document.....

I wouldn't blame Acrobat for this at all. It is something quirky in the
Word interface to printer drivers. It is even worse for those of us in
countries where its hardwired default US Letter size paper is seldom seen..

Regards,
Martin Brown

Thanks for the update.!!
Yes, I'm aware Word has it's share of issues.
It's one of the reasons I still use the Word-97 version.
Plus, I'm a cheap SOB and never saw much in the later versions that
justified the switch to them.
(Much like Vista, I might add. My most recent PC rebuild was with a
new copy of XP-SP3)

Anyway, I "may" have narrowed down at least part of the problem.
Like I said, usually just setting the PostScript in Word's printer
dialog boxes does the trick.

I discovered that I had a tiny overlap of a graphic that extended into
the page margins.
It was part of a table that I had manually re-sized after placing it
on the page.
When printing to paper, you can just tell Word to ignore margin
overlap errors and it prints just fine -- unless you're off the page
or into the parts where the printer physically grabs the page for
transport through the printer!!
Not so with Acrobat Distiller. (Though it made no difference with the
other PDF writers... which itself is quite curious and yet another
clue something is very screwy here!!)

Adjusting the document to pull all content within the user-defined
page size (including margins) made things better.
Not perfect.... but better. Still the wrong paper size, but not
nearly so far off as before.

I also discovered (as you suggested) that changing some fields in the
dialog boxes may not actually have any effect at all.
This is also true in the case that some of the Postscript settings
would not override the document settings in Word.
For example, you could change the paper size and orientation in
Postscript, but only the orientation would change in the PDF.
And interestingly, changing the paper size in both P/S dialog box and
Document setup has no effect either.
Word reverts to US letter size. (How idiotic is that?)

Plus, (this is classic!!), in the Acrobat add-on for Word-97, there
are actually two different places in the Postscript dialog box where
you can set the paper size, but Word (or the driver?) doesn't seem to
pay any attention to either setting. Though, this behavior may be
related to having content outside the defined page margins.

In short, it looks like a big part of the problem is having graphics
or text either too close to the page edge, too close to the defined
page margins, or simply having text/graphics outside the page margins.

My drivers that ultimately print to paper (i.e., a printer) seem to
work fine if you choose "Ignore" (when/if Word complains).
But it looks like you'd better fix the document to be 100% error free
if you want to print an electronic copy to PDF using Postscript.

Oh, while we're on printer drivers -- you'll love this one.
The Microsoft printer driver for the old-style HP Draftpro Plus E-size
plotter (8-pen carosel pen plotter) was programmed to send a "Page-
Eject" command to the plotter.
Evidently, this was to ensure that the forthcomeing plot would be
printed on a fresh ***.

Only problem: The Draftpro Plus was a *** feed desgin. It doesn't
have the roll-feed option.
So ejecting the page would ensure there would never be paper in the
plotter!

I think this is a clue that the folks at Microsoft really don't test
their code. How could you miss that one?!
.

Quantcast