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How to stop formatting changes after Word doc converted or printed to PDF

Anonymous
2020-08-26T22:37:00+00:00

I have created templates that assemble into documents fine. When these documents are converted or printed to pdf by the user, the formatting shifts - page breaks disappear and some of the spacing provided by hard returns for the signature page are gone. Normal style is used throughout with an adjustment of times new roman 12 font.

I am making the templates on a machine that has no physical printer attached so the default printer is Microsoft Print to PDF. The users have various print options including Foxit, Adobe PDF, Microsoft Print to PDF and physical printers.

How can I stop the formatting change upon conversion to pdf?

Suggestions I've received so far:

-set the default printer to adobe pdf instead of just printing to adobe pdf or converting with adobe

-try saving the document as .doc instead of .docx before the conversion

-set the document to "Restrict Editing" before the conversion

-confirm current printer drivers are updated

-confirm current video drivers are updated

I'm informed the drivers have been updated and Adobe PDF is always the default printer, saving to .doc first did not help.

Any ideas?? I hope to have access one of the machines in question soon.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Charles Kenyon 166.7K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-08-26T23:54:05+00:00

    Short answer is that you cannot prevent this.

    You can minimize it.

    This goes to the nature of Word and has been true as long as Word has been around. Word uses local resources in formatting and generally will be different on different machines.

    Here are two articles that explain this and have tips that can help you minimize the changes.

    You can convert to pdf on your machine and send the pdf.

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Charles Kenyon 166.7K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-08-27T02:02:25+00:00

    If you would like an analysis of things in a document that may be making this problem worse, pick one of the problem documents and save it on DropBox or OneDrive and post a link here.

    Here are directions on how to take out confidential information and post.

    Trouble Shooting - Share OneDrive File - by Rohn

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-27T00:33:00+00:00

    We don't get any issues moving the Word document from machine to machine but we definitely don't seem to be able to  prevent the changes that happen on conversion to pdf. I plan to try setting Microsoft Print to PDF as the default printer before trying to print.

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