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Table borders appearing as images in PDF?

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2008-09-05 00:07:02
rvdeede
Registered: Jun 13 2008
Posts: 19

Hi there.

We have a Word 2003 document here that contains large tables copied across from Excel sheets into a landscape section of the Word document, which we then convert to PDF using V8 Professional. All is fine (though not wonderful) on screen, but when we try to print any of these pages our printer just chokes. The PDF itself is 1.5MB, but within seconds the print spooler suggests that the print job quickly amounts to more than 60MB.

Yesterday we have found that, whereas the text is encoded as normal text, seemingly there is a small bitmap image hiding behind each row of the table. Each of these images contains only the borders of that row. All of the images together make up 83% of the PDF file.

Does anyone know why the tables borders are included as images? How do we change it so the borders are included as lines instead of images?

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 8.1.2, Windows
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2008-09-05 05:43:04
#1
mark_poston_mekon
Registered: Apr 16 2008
Posts: 15
Hi,
Are the Excel tables referenced as OLE objects?
This may have something to do with the way they are printed and rendered?
What happens if you have regular Word tables, do these present the same problem?
Regards
Mark
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2008-09-05 06:19:37
#2
rvdeede
Registered: Jun 13 2008
Posts: 19
Hi Mark,

No, not an OLE object.

As per your suggestion, I've just tried the following:

1. Created a new word document A with only a 2-row 5-column table and dotted-line borders like we have in the problem document.
2. Created a new word document B with only a 2-row 5-column table and normal 1/2pt full borders.

Converting both documents to PDF (having set the default printer to Adobe PDF), and subsequently printing these PDFs leads to the following observations:

- Document A: doc size 28KB, PDF size 17KB, spool job [b]4MB[/b]!! Table borders are indeed included as bitmap images for each row.
- Document B: doc size 27KB, PDF size 8KB, spool job 5KB. Table borders included as normal lines.

So this looks like it is standard behaviour as soon as you have dotted-line borders on Word tables?? Problem here is that the PDF of the real document won't even print anymore on our departmental 288MB memory printer ...

Any suggestions other than "don't use Word" or "change the borders to full lines"?
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2008-09-05 07:02:30
#3
mark_poston_mekon
Registered: Apr 16 2008
Posts: 15
This definitely seems to be an issue with Word and as such I am not sure there is a solution. Having looked through the print options there doesn't appear to be any preferences that can change this behaviour.
Sorry I can't help further.
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