OT: Acrobat Problems

Nevermind. I got it to work. Printed the document in landscape (which left the huge white space on the left side), and then used Acrobat 5.0's crop feature to move the left margin in to the center. That did the trick.

Something is still obviously wrong, but I don't do it often enough to care. Will just chalk it up to yet another Microsoft mystery...

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

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

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).

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

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

I have Nerd 2003, and tried to print a prelim patent wheer the last 3 pages are figures. The last page (3rd figure) shows OK in Nerd but in the Acrobat PDF, the last 2/3rds of the image is inverted (black and white reversed). How can this be fixed?

PDF995.

It looks like a printer to the OS, and seems to work like a charm:

This was made with Word 2000, but if your S/W can print, it can use PDF995.

Good Luck! Rich

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 sheet.

Only problem: The Draftpro Plus was a sheet 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?!

PDF995 may be the cat's meow, but i cannot say one way or the other, because the damn files are too big for download (on dial-up). Suggestions?

In _Word_, NOT Acrobat, create a custom "paper" size. Caution: You must create the custom size, then exit that window, then re-enter the print dialogue to get the custom size to "take".

...Jim Thompson

I do custom paper sizes in CorelDraw and Acrobat (so far) handles them correctly - even for multiple pages of different sizes; si i would expect the same with Nerd. However, i have a graphic in Nerd with greys (8-bit GIF) that looks perfectly OK - but Acrobat inverts/solarizes the bottom 2/3rds of it. PDF995 perhaps would save the day - but it is unavailable as mentioned above.

What originating program are you using to print to PDF?

...Jim Thompson

=20

=20

=20

=20

seen.

MSword and the rest of MSoffice hit its peak with Word/office 2000. MSOrifice 2007 actually qualifies as an abomination. The worst thing that MS has done since Bob, which still did not eclipse the badness of Win 95.

How about ME?

What about you?

Never used ME. ;-)

Word has always been a bodged job that nobody could understand or maintain reliably. Fix one bug and break two more like the hydra. Word2007 plumbs new depths of bug ridden behaviour though.

Office and XL2002/2003 were the peak in terms of getting things right. The polynomial fit in the charting was done by someone with real talent. LINEST() was bodged.

XL2007 charts now exactly reproduces the wrong result for tricky cubics and above that LINEST() and another well known stats package produce. Shame they don't employ professional numerical analysts for these internal functions.

Office 2007 is a spectacular disaster. A triumph of form over function. It is great fun to see experienced Office users fight with the ribbon. My main objections are the glacial slowness of calibration charts - things which took 2s in all earlier versions now have to display an estimated time to completion in *minutes* to stop users aborting it. I wasn't that impressed with the two ticks at 10^8 on log graphs either.

I think of the recent Dozes Win2k and worse still WinME named after a brain wasting disease was the pits. By comparison Win95 was quite good. Some versions of every software package are best avoided if you value your sanity.

Regards, Martin Brown

I have since it first came out. I still have the original install, that was copied to an 80 GB hard drive when the 20 GB drive filled up with datasheets. It worked fine through five motherboards. I recently installed it in a Emachines XP computer when the hard drive failed. I have a lot of hardware and software that won't work with NT XP or Vista.

The GIF is exported from CorelDraw and no program "knows" that. Then that GIF is inserted into a Nerd 2003 document which i then print to PDF via Adobe Acrobat 4.0 .

You??

E-mail me the GIF and I'll try it here. My bet is it's a 'Nerd' 2003 problem.

...Jim Thompson

No, ME!