Latest update to Word causes incorrect PDF to be generated when exporting to PDF

Question

The latest update to Word which was installed on my computer September 30, 2022 causes incorrect PDF output generated when exporting a Word document to PDF. It seems to turn all text boxes into RGB objects even though the text boxes contain black text. This is a problem in print production when you want to print said pages in grayscale or black and white. In my case, the number of pages which had color on them went from 72 to 270. The extra pages show up as having color objects when you run Adobe Acrobat preflight with the text boxes the offending culprit. This will cause lots of people problems.

The same Word document worked fine the day before.

My current version of Word is Version 2209 build 15629.20156 Click-to-run. There appear to be two Word updates around the time, and I cannot test which one the problem was first introduced in, because as far as I can tell, there's no way to uninstall (or rollback) an Office update.

I did take my Word document to another computer which has an older version of Word and did the export to PDF there. Those PDFs do not exhibit the problem.

Note that this also affects PDF manipulation programs like Acrobat and Foxit's product which both seem to use Word as then engine to generate something which they then use to make their PDFs. Thus now Adobe Acrobat Pro has the same problem when creating a PDF from a Word document.

I would report this as a bug, but there doesn't seem to way to do that either. I had to painfully use Adobe Acrobat to convert individual pages (about 540 of them) to grayscale as a workaround to make my document publishable.

**Note** Rolling back to version 2208 (Build 15601.20088) which was an August update, fixed the problem.

Answer 1

If a rollback to a previous version turns out to be the only solution, instructions are here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2bd5c457-a917-d57e-35a1-f709e3dda841

Answer 2

Does the issue also occur if you use the Microsoft Print to PDF utility

Alternatively, with some of the free, third party PDF Printers, such as Primo PDF, you can set the output to be in Black & White

Answer 3

I am trying to submit a book to a printing company. The printing company allows the book to be composed of pages printed in color and pages printed in grayscale. Pages which contain anything that the preflight analyzer show as containing color have to be printed as color pages. The preflight analysis shows all textboxes as color RGB images and the printer would require those pages to be printed in color. If it was just a couple of pages, I'd say go ahead, but it is almost 200 additional pages which will add significant cost to printing the book -- raising the price of the book substantially.

This problem occurred in between two submission of my book. The first one generated properly and I was cleaning up some other small issues when I submitted the second updated version. The second version all the sudden marked all these text boxes as "RGB color images" even though they are not images and do not contain color. After spending several hours trying to figure out how that happened and running several tests, and also installing Acrobat Pro so I could generate the preflight information myself, I noticed that Word had been updated between the first and second submission.

So I got a computer that had an older version of Word and used that to generate the PDF for my book and discovered that the problem does not occur.

I'm certainly not an expert in color profiles, PDF, etc. But the printing company rejected my submission unless I pay the additional cost to print the extra pages in color.

Answer 4

You can report a bug by using File | Feedback | Send a Frown. Include as much detail as possible and don't expect a response.

Answer 5

Word's color model is RGB. Black text is R0 G0 B0, not "black" or grayscale. Please state what job you're trying to get done and why Word's RGB colors pose a problem to getting that job done.