About Justin VanAlstyne Expertise I have a full working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - 7.01. I have experience in creating interactive PDFs, embedding multimedia, web-based forms, creating presentations using PDF, advanced prepress preparation, PDF web optimization, color management, and using PDF as a soft-proofing tool. I do not have a lot of experience using Acrobat`s advanced Javascripting features, though a lot of custom functionality can be built into a PDF this way.
Experience
Past/Present clients Marsh, Inc. (http://www.marsh.com), Impel Corp (http://www.impelcorp.com), Home Properties (http://www.homeproperties.com)
Expert: Justin VanAlstyne Date: 8/25/2004 Subject: problem with word to pdf conversion changing line breaks
Question When converting documents from Word 2000 to PDF, using the PDFWriter toolbar button from with Word, the page breaks in the final PDF document are sometimes different than in the original word document. I was under the impression that the PDF conversion took a sort of "snapshot" of each page & that nothing would be altered -- fonts, line breaks, page breaks, etc. It seems that this is not true. We are using Acrobat 5 (windows) for the conversion.
Do you have any ideas what setting is causing the page breaks to shift during the conversion? How can the conversion be set to keep the lines on the pages EXACTLY where they are in the orignal Word 2000 doc? We don't want to have to insert page break codes for each page, if we can avoid it -- we litterally have thousands of documents to
convert and each document can be quite long. Inserting the page break codes would take days!
Any suggestions on why this is happening & any tips on what to try to solve it would be greatly appreciated!
Answer The problem probably lies in the PDFWriter tool tha Adobe installs for use in MS Office. The PDFWriter adds in a number of "features" to your PDF that you wouldn't normally have if you just used the the traditional PDF creation means. It embeds things like document structures, automatic hotlinks, and things of that nature. I believe there are a few options within the PDFWriter that allow you to choose what to include and what not to include, but I'm not positive.
If those options don't help you out, it is probably just easiest to print the documents and choose the "Adobe PDF" as the printer. This way everything is take like a "snapshot". Things can change when printing from these applications if your not careful though. Just like how things in Excel looks great on the screen, but print on 20 pages without explanation. If you do a "print preview" of the document and all looks good, the printing it to a PDF should be the exact same.
