I recently taught an Acrobat 9 class and six students of nine complained that Acrobat changes the pagination when they convert to PDF from Word or WordPerfect. One person said she had a PostScript printer, but didn't specify which one, the others didn't know their printers.
What would cause the pagination to change? I think they are all on Windows.
~ Jane
Just some nattering observations on my part.
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WordPerfect:
Currently, Corel uses a Nuance product to output PDF.
Prior to this Corel used an "in house" routine.
Consequently, Acrobat's PDFMaker does not support output to PDF of WordPerfects file format.
With that said, if Acrobat is installed then the Adobe PDF printer is installed.
Certainly, if this virtual printer is used, one can 'print' PDF with it.
However, this route is no different than if one printed to an attached printer for hard copy.
A File > Print via Adobe PDF printer that yields something "off" in the PDF it can be expected that something will be "off" if one printed to paper via the attached printer's "printer".
I suspect funky PDF output from WordPerfect stems from what is happening in WP and/or the Nuance stuff.
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MS Word:
Prior to Office 2007, MS Word locked in on the local machine's default printer and that virtual printer's print metrics.
This is something that a user can turn off; however, it is somewhat buried in the bowls of MS Word.
Actually, sort of nice if all one does in put imprint to paper - then 'wysiwyg' locked in is nice, eh?
If one had a local or network printer's virtual printer as the default and, mid-stream, changed to PDFMaker / Adobe PDF printer this typically left MS Word confused as to the proper printer metrics to use.
Office 2007's MS Word no longer has that "lock and load" approach.
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Regardless, best practice (when generating output PDF) is to start with Adobe PDF printer as the default.
Then open the desired authoring application.
Another issue with MS Word has been/is updating fields prior to 'print'.
Then there's the funky PDF page content that stems from content authors overlapping body page content with the header and/or footer regions (usually the footer region).
A recent issue identified by some users is associated with contemporary Word using a page background of a grey tone rather than the traditional white page background.
This puts sand in the gears, so to speak, when output is to PDF.
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With that said, if one is using Office 2010 all bets are off as Office 2010 appears to have been a major re-do of what is under the hood.
Adobe has indicated, at the Acrobat FAQ page, that:
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http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/faq
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While Acrobat can and does have 'bugs', it has been my experience that, in most cases - most times, if the output PDF page content is funky it is due to either something the content author did or did not do in the authoring file and/or a configuration issue within the authoring application.
I've come to this observation having used WordPerfect from WP5.1 for DOS through version available to around 2005; MS Word in the Office releases for Windows 3.x through Office 2007, and FrameMaker releases since FrameMaker 5 in conjuction with Acrobat release 3.x through 9.x.
Of course before the dark ages of DOS there were the applications available for Atari 1040STs and Amigas and the Apple stuff run via emulator on the Atari 1040 STs; but, that's a tale from long-long ago .
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So, all I'm saying is - often it is the user - not the software (although there *are* times when software bugs/improvements can try one's patience to the extreme).
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What might help is to park some sample MS Word files and associated PDFs up at acrobat.com.
Then share the link(s) here. That would provide AUC members an opportunity to look at and evaulate the files for possible problems/issues.
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Be well...