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Word 2003 --> Creating A PDF

clamm
Registered: Jun 22 2007
Posts: 4

Hi,
I am a relatively savy IT professional trying to troubleshoot why a brochure I created in Word is not identically aligned when the PDF is created.

I will explain in more detail the various tests I ran, but dumbed down entirely I still had the problem. I created a regular word doc (not brochure) to test with.
I put text on the page in Times New Roman Font of various sizes. I also used left/center/right justification and bold/italic.

I save it in Word 2003 and print it on my printer and then open Acrobat 8 and click create PDF using Highest Print quality and print that. When I lay one on top of the other, the words are not positioned in the same spots on the page. The funny thing is that every line is different. One line might be slightly lower, the next lower and to the right.

Any thoughts on what might be happening?

Here is what has failed to work so far.
1) creating pdf from word 2003.
2) creating pdf from acrobat 8(trial version).
3) creating pdf from two open source pdf products (matched acrobat output).
4) Original document had text boxes and some graphics and three columns. I tried removing the graphics, the text boxes, etc.

With the first open source product my logo was all choppy. With Adobe's online creator of PDFs, my logo and other words got chopped off on the right side. With Acrobat, the alignment is off.

Any thoughts?

Thank you,

Colette

gkaiseril
Expert
Registered: Feb 23 2006
Posts: 4307
Sounds like the developers did not interpret all the standards involved the same way. Or you might not be selecting the appropriate conversion settings for generating the PDF. For example. Acrobat at settings other than the highest print quality uses the RGB colors to generate colors and uses a value between 0 and 1 for the intensity of the primary color, Peg uses value between 0 and 256. One also has the problem that printing to different printers can produce different results when the document is reformatted to the new target printer. There are also changes caused when PDFs are created with Accessibility reflow being added.

If you can find a copy of Carl Young book on creating professional looking PDFs you will find more information about the multitude of conversion settings and methods.

George Kaiser

clamm
Registered: Jun 22 2007
Posts: 4
I finally got it working. Though I changed a couple of different settings, I believe one might have had the biggest difference.

First, taking the advice of the other email, I modified the Preferences in Acrobat for Word by changing the settings under High Quality. I unchecked bookmarks, links, and enable accessibility and reflow. I don't believe this made the difference. Saving it with a new name.

On the same screen, I changed the layout of the page from portrait to landscape. Even though, it is considered a default, it didn't recognize my document was landscape. I did the change by reversing the measurements of the length and width.

The second area that I changed was the printing settings. When the printing screen came up, I unchecked Auto-Rotate and Center and changed the Page Scaling to NONE.

I believe changing to landscape and turning off the rotate and scaling made the difference. It does surprise me that such a simple document could have so much trouble with default settings.