Export to .pdf without page breaks

Thank you, Jakob, for bring up this topic.  I have been searching around for the very same thing.  Like you, I have not found a solution. 

Here is my very specific situation.

I work in a corporate training department writing manuals.  For the bulk of our existence, we printed all of our manuals for in-person training.  Some people loved this because they could carry them around.  Some people hated this because it meant lugging them around.  So we started supplying PDF versions for download.

(We provide PDF versions because they cannot be edited as a Word doc could be)

Now that we are delivering almost all of our training remotely, we no longer print and only provide PDFs.  As long as we are not routing our manuals to printers, we have no need for the concept of page breaks.

MS Word has excellent capabilities to create *.mht files with Tables of Contents that automatically create hyperlinks.  It's great!  But when I attempt to save the document into a PDF, the page breaks are there.

This is why I, personally, am looking for this.  It's not just some late-night curiosity.  There's a very real business purpose.

I discovered that Set Page Box control under Tools/Print Production seems to accomplish this. There is a box called "Remove White Margins" will accomplish this. Doing this causes some changes in the layout since margins are gone. But you might be able to tweak it to make it work for you. Now when I post my pdfs online they have no page breaks and scroll nicely. They don't have the margins that look nice, but I am in the process of tweaking the margins which you can also set. Good luck hope it works for you!

I should have been more clear. My goal was to take a Word file and save as pdf and post it online without the large spaces that reflect the space at the bottom of the page, and the top of the next. There is a big gap so as you scroll down you hit a big gap for every page break. In Acrobat DC I used the commands I mentioned above and those got rid of that. You can also tweak the page margins as well but I did not much play with that. So now I have a completely scrollable pdf with no gaps. That was enough to solve my problem and it allows me to work with Word and then PDF to accomplish my needs. I would also mention that when you save to PDF from Word, be sure to use the Save As feature and then select PDF as File Type, instead of the Save as PDF found at the File menu level, which never seems to work quite right.

Hi! I'm Chay your fellow Community member. My apologies for the inconvenience.

As you mentioned and probably understand PDF is a Printer Definition file.PDF's are page based. Continuous scrolling (no on-screen page breaks) is and should be a viewer setting. Maybe you can change paper sizes in a PDF editor, like Acrobat.

you can also convert via doc to html and html to pdf. but some of the components are mismatch

thanks.

Hi Chay,

Thank you for your reply. 

Actually, resizing it in .pdf viewer tool only spread the elements among currently existing pages. Converting to html doesn't work since it breaks the components as you mentioned. 

I tried to copy it to Publisher since Publisher allows to export longer pages but also breaks. There is no "Paste" option to import it with keeping source formatting like some guides says. I also tried to import word document into publisher from the templates but it simply shuts down when doing that. 

Previously, I tried to prepare everything in publisher but exporting from Publisher to html also breaks the layout. I start to believe that there's no way to achieve it with Microsoft tools :(

Hi! I'm Chay your fellow Community member. My apologies for the inconvenience.

As you mentioned and probably understand PDF is a Printer Definition file.PDF's are page based. Continuous scrolling (no on-screen page breaks) is and should be a viewer setting. Maybe you can change paper sizes in a PDF editor, like Acrobat.

you can also convert via doc to html and html to pdf. but some of the components are mismatch

thanks.