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Need assistance converting an MS Word document to PDF

Maysie
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Joined: Apr 21 2005

Any babblers who can help me with this I would be most grateful. I realize this is an odd question to ask on a Friday afternoon. The glamourous life of the freelancer.

I've been trying to convert a large (over 100 pages) document in MS Word 2008 (for Mac) to PDF. It's important that the pagnation is identical and each time I do it, the pagination ends up all wrong, even though the document in Word looks fine on my screen. Even the table of contents gets bunged up, the tabs keep moving around on me re the numbers lining up.

I'm using a free online PDF maker, if that matters.

It's driving me batty and I've done it almost 10 times, tweaking each time, and I'm only at page 30. I can't go on like this!


Comments

theboxman
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Joined: Nov 25 2008

That's odd. I use a free downloadable software called pdf995. Not the best thing out there, I'm sure, but so far it's done the job for me without any pagination issues, so it might be worth a try. 


rural - Francesca
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Joined: Dec 31 2007

I've used "Cutie" PDF creator and never been an issue


CalmCalm
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Joined: Feb 23 2009
Hi! Maysie I do this quite alot myself. If you have "Office" then the Adobe PDF plug comes with it. You should be able to convert using Adobe PDF and not some chinzy free PDF maker. Make sure that the PDF maker is set up to take the same page size which your Word document is. No sense in creating a Word document in 8.5 x 11 and have your PDF maker at 8 x11 as an example.

I sort of collect software. I don't own any freeware or shareware stuff.

If you need help with software, just ask me. It never cost me anything so obviously, it would be free to you too.

Calm

 


Green Grouch
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Joined: Mar 6 2009

The prob might be the length of the doc in Word; 100 pages (if you have any formatting to speak of) can challenge Bill's Baby. Is there any chance you can split the Word file into 2 docs?

I use OpenOffice Writer, which is a free open source suite that mimics Microsoft jobbies. It has a built in PDF writer that's very quick and unfussy. But that may not be a solution; depending on your default settings, Writer can mess up the margins of a Word-generated doc just enough to throw off the formatting or pagination (unless you have hard page breaks put in-- it seems fine with those.) But if it's fairly simple formatting it may open the Word doc fine. May be worth a try....

As I'm sure you know there are tons of downloadable PDF writers for free or near-free, but they're time consuming to install and test.

Sorry!


alisea
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Joined: Jun 25 2003

You can download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, full features, for 30 days, absolutely free. I'm just sayin'


Ze
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Joined: Nov 14 2008

.


Michelle
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Joined: May 10 2001

"Bill's Baby".  Haha! :D


Maysie
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Joined: Apr 21 2005

Thanks everyone! I found out that I can download Adobe Acrobat for free, and that I have plenty of memory to do so (I'm uptight about downloading applications). I did it and it's fine.

Thanks again!


Sineed
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Joined: Dec 4 2005

A nifty bit of freeware I've been using for the past year on my MacBook is NeoOffice.  It converts docs to PDFs in a jiffy (and it comes with the whole office suite).


nancy2009
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Joined: Jan 20 2010

hi, i recommend simpo Word to PDF, beside accurate conversion result, it can also support to convert hyperlink in word to PDF. http://www.simpopdf.com/word-to-pdf.html


Unionist
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Joined: Dec 11 2005

[deleted by author - not important]


Frustrated Mess
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Joined: Feb 23 2005

The Mac is a *nix based system and has support for Postscript and PDF is an open document format. I would be shocked, SHOCKED, if you can't just select to print to file as PDF.


Frustrated Mess
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Joined: Feb 23 2005

And if I am justifiably shocked, the windows world, Linux has native support for PDF, has a wonderful little open source app called PDFCreator. There appears to be a Mac version: http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13334/jaws-pdf-creator

Also, if you must use Windoze, there is also a wonderful app called PDFSAM (google it) to split and merge PDF files. And if you've ever wanted to change a PDF file, Open Office has a Sun PDF plug-in that will allow you to open and make basic changes to PDF files.


abnormal
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Joined: Aug 18 2001

This works fine

http://66.89.113.16/doc2pdf/Default.aspx

Though I admit that I've never done a 100 page doc.


RosaL
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Joined: Mar 4 2007

Just "print to pdf".

Select print. In the window that opens up there will be a 'pdf' drop-down in the lower left corner. Select 'save as pdf'. That's it. There is no need to use another program. 


Michelle
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Joined: May 10 2001
I think the issue wasn't making it go to PDF - I think it was that the pagination gets screwed up somehow when she does it.

radiorahim
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Joined: Jun 17 2002

Yeah GNU/Linux natively converts anything to .pdf and I would suspect MacOSX does as well.   Open Office also natively converts to .pdf

If the pagination is tricky it might be better to bring it into Open Office..."fix" it (if need be) and then export to .pdf


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