Word page count changes when printing/exporting

Stefen,

Your first suggestion made me think further about the letter content. My letter templates from which the letter is merged do indeed use hidden text to decide whether or not to print the header/footer to allow for printing on plain paper or pre-printed stationary. 

In my tests, Word 365 has got Display Hidden Text set and Print Hidden Text cleared in the options. When I set the options to display and print hidden text, I see and print a 3 page document. When I set them both to not display/print the hidden text, I see and print a 2 page document. 

There must be the remnants of some hidden text somewhere in the document. I can't find it with Advanced Find, but I suspect it is there somewhere.

My previous versions of Word all had both options set. I assume that this is the default setting and that I had changed the setting on Word 365 which I use on a day-to-day basis.

My page counting code needs to ensure that these settings match. I will modify it to make sure that the options are set to display and print hidden text, because I will always want to export header/footers to PDF to ensure the logos etc. are shown in the document.

Thank you for your help.

Word can always give a different page count when printing to different printers. For this purpose, saving to pdf is the equivalent of printing.

Why has my page layout changed when I open my document on a different machine? by Suzanne Barnhill, MVP

Well, you can always reapply any lost text formatting. The document I (re-)created no longer adds a superfluous page when you convert it to PDF, via the Save As dialog box.

The purpose of copying content and omitting the final paragraph mark is to flush out any damaged structures (that is, document corruption). Are you saying that the document, when you test it, still behaves strangely?

Thank you Stefan.

I do not think there is hidden text in the document. As you know, the header and footer and page layout information is stored in a in the last paragraph mark of each section a document. By omitting the last paragraph mark of the document, you have deleted the last section's header and footer. You have also lost  the paragraph formatting of the last paragraph of the document, which has no lost its hanging indent.

I'm afraid that that has not worked.

Such a workaround would not provide me with a solution even if it had worked. How would I even know when I am reading the page count of the document that it would be different to the exported PDF?

This is not a freak document. I have seen this occur before when I developed the code to send the document to Docmail. On that occasion we put it down to differences in Word versions. But there is clearly a problem here that with a given document, Word 365 is printing the wrong number of pages when all earlier versions of Word do not have a problem with the very same document.

I appreciate you help. I posted the problem here because I knew I would find the very best minds to tackle this very strange phenomena.

In your example document, I see three pages when nonprinting marks are displayed, because some of the content is being pushed to the third page (for some reason).

I'm guessing that there are some hidden content in the file, but I haven't been able to locate it.

Anyway, what you can do is copy document content, minus the final paragrah mark (¶), into a new, blank document. (To show/hide nonprinting marks, click the ¶ icon on the Home tab.)

I have done that and uploaded the modified document to this folder: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvS-HIVsUYvxh02-XNKCMfJ6Gjyr?e=vlmcUz. Download it and post back when you have retrieved it.