Interesting Word/PDF issue, need advice...

[tyma]

Well, this is interesting.

(And yes, before I get into this, I'll admit - I'm a gamer geek. The document I reference is a character sheet. Sue me. Heh.)

Anyway, look at this file:
http://www.domibia.com/dloads/tristatsheet.doc
It's a Word:mac v.X file. The tables are all nicely bordered along the grey cell in each section, exactly as I want them to be.

Now look at this file:
http://www.domibia.com/dloads/tristatsheet.pdf
This is a PDF of the same file created using the "Save as PDF" function on the Print dialog box when "File>Print" is chosen from within Word. In each table, only the last cell is bordered properly against the grey cell in each section.

What gives?

In Word, I have removed the cell border on the left against the grey cell, re-created them, and made a brand new PDF, but the problem still remains.

Any hints? I want to distribute this document via PDF to other people, but I don't want it to look sloppy.

Thanks,
Tim.

 

[ex2bot]

Tinkering around with your file very briefly, I got the same results. But changing border width to 1 point instead of 1/2 point or hairline or whatever seemed to fix the problem.

Good luck!

Doug

 

[elander]

I checked your PDF in Acrobat, and moved the grey rectangle on the right just a little bit to the right. The border is there, it is just that the grey rectangle gets drawn on top, and covers it for some of your cells.

The cells aren't exactly the same width, some are slightly more narrow than others, which explains why some of the borders show.

This happens for a simple reason:
Word doesn't create the best PostScript files in the world. It doesn't have the precise positioning of items as a regular layout application (e.g. InDesign, PageMaker, QuarkXPress et al). If positioning isn't precise, errors of this kind become common. This also explains why thicker borders work, sort of. They wont have the correct width, but they become visible simply because they are wider, and some part of them simply show up beside the grey.

Also, many of the grey rectangles are composed of several objects in the PDF: one large rectangle, and then one rectangle for each line of text (the text lines that are perpendicular to the regular text), and sometimes one or more extra rectangles of the same size as the text rectangle, with a grey filling sitting on top of the original grey and beneath the text. This wouldn't be the case if the document had been created in InDesign.

How to avoid this: don't use Word if you want high precision. Seriously. If you want fine details, you'll have to use a layout application that allows for that precision. Word doesn't, it's a word processor, not a layout application, no matter what Microsoft tries to make you beleive.