Mac Forum / Applications / Word / June 2006

It's been over 24 hrs since we've heard back...

On 6/24/06 12:26 AM, in article C0C2FBF9.3BC3B%john@mcghie.name, "John
McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@mcghie.name> wrote:

... Do you think it may be, perhaps, just the *opposite*?:)

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

Actually, no, it isn't...

Look up the StyleRef field in the Word Help.

Use a particular style for the paragraph you want to appear in the header.
The StyleRef field will copy the text of the latest paragraph of that style
into the current header: you can thus use only one section break for a whole
book.

Regrettably, depending on how lucky you get, Acrobat may see that as a
"change" and throw a new job anyway.

That's what it's doing, by the way: it's interpreting a call for "new paper"
as a call for a "new job".  It doesn't commit that "particular" crime on the
PC...

A section break is not a single character in Word.  It's not *even* a
character.  It's a Property Container; a "bucket" of settings and
measurements (potentially, several hundred of them).  One of the
specifications is whether to start a new page, another determines whether to
use different paper stock, and a third determines whether to begin a new
print job.  Acrobat misinterprets that last one on the Mac.

Cheers

On 26/6/06 11:22 AM, in article
1151284959.612399.303670@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com, "nsmcc"
<nora.mccauley@gmail.com> wrote:

 If you have Acrobat Standard or Pro,
Open first part of your document.
go to Documents menu and choose add pages
choose second part of document and chhose to add to end. Make sure your
at end of last page in the original.

Then go to end of last page you added and repeat process, as many times
as needed.

Yeah, we did hang a bit of fun off the back of your query didn't we?

You seem to have got to the point where you can see that section breaks
are quite useful, but rather fragile.

You might find that strictly observing styles and avoiding touching any
margin settings for any reason might let your document last longer
before the PDFs print in fragments. But then again, you might not.

I have got to the next stage where the PDF stitcher I use is so
painless that I cease to worry. I use PDF a lot when exchanging docs by
mail with colleagues. It is the only way they get to see what it was
like before Word repaginates it for their computer. That way I can have
a phone conversation about the "second paragraph on page 233" without
too much hilarity.

The other use I have for the stitcher is when producing two-up double
sided booklets on my single-sider laser printer. (A feeble attempt to
save the planet, pine forests, time and money) Word makes a royal mess
of those when section breaks intrude. My workflow is to produce the doc
in Word, print to postscript with OS X (I'm getting in another dig at
Word's idiotic behavior of printing low-res previews of eps diagrams to
PDF and leaving the vecor art on the cutting room floor), convert the
Postscript to PDF in Preview for each of the fragments. Stitch the PDFs
togather with PDFLab, hand the resulting file to Cheapimposter, which
manages the imposition tasks of working out which pages are on the back
of which other ones, allowing for gutters, scaling the pages and stuff.
It gives me two PDFs, one even pages, one odds reversed, which I print
with a little shove-the-output-back-in-the-in-tray dance in between.

My point in telling you this is twofold. First to say it is actually
quite easy to do all this. The results are OK, so you don't need to
feel foolish as you do it. Well, at least you know you have foolish
company.

The second, is in case those who look after Word are visiting.

Here comes a rant.

Why Oh Why do you force all this on users? Surely PDF production with
section breaks and eps illustrations and at least 2-up imposition is
among the *primary* tasks of a word processor in the internet age.
Surely an option to lock the pagination on e-mailed Word documents is
seen as worthwhile?

Yet we have gone through two or three versions of Word where this is
getting worse, not better. Instead we get more and more silly childish
clip art, and an increasing fragility with respect to document margins
and printing services. The moment anyone sees Word clip-art in a
document, is the moment they think "Bozo!". Leave it out and
concentrate on word processing. Insert picture from file without
messing it up is all the graphics anyone needs, but Word can't even do
that without introducing massive cross-platform fragility.

Blaming it on Apple's print services or Quicktime is simply not an
option. Not when you are the only one out of step.

I really hate having to optically reduce my fonts when going 2-up, yet
there is no other way I can do it. For proper finished work I end up
pouring the text into InDesign. Every time I do that, I ask myself why
I bother with Word at all. I should be able to do 2-up straight from
Word but there is no way to do 2-up without optical reduction.

So how about it? A little less time on ribbons for thwarting the Apple
Human Interface Guidelines, a lot less time on clip art, and a bit of
effort in getting the bugs out of PDF and margins and getting section
breaks working as well as they did in Word 5.1a?

Happy now Clive? Normal service has been resumed.

It's probably not Word:Mac.  The PC should be running exactly the same code
for this operation, and it doesn't have the problem.

The information is being presented to the print routine: under some
circumstances it fails to interpret it correctly.  It would be interesting
to know whether this problem ever shows up during output to "paper".  It
would be difficult to tell if it did: either way, the printer would produce
a new sheet of paper.

The multiple documents problem doesn't happen all the time: when it does
happen, it is most likely to occur when something persuades the print
routine that a change in page layout has occurred.

Cheers

On 27/6/06 1:51 AM, in article OLgkrhTmGHA.4700@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl,