What's the best way to make a PDF from Word?

Dear Lori,

I recently purchased Acrobat 7.0 and am under a bit of pressure. I have several hundred books to produce and am totally committed to using the new version of Acrobat and some third-party plug-ins. When I format the book in MS Word and do the initial conversion to PDF using the PDFMaker icon on Word's toolbar, the PDF version comes out formatted differently than the original Word layout. It usually gives me a few additional pages — with just a few lines on some of the chapters — which throws the formatting out the window. I plan to go through the tutorials soon, but am about 300 books behind because of problems with the old system and the short learning curve with the new system. Have I configured something incorrectly? How do I get an exact copy? Is it a configuration problem and if so, how do I make the changes? Please help!

— Linda, Kentucky

Lori responds,

Hi Linda,

MS Word will reformat your document based on the printer driver. When you select Print to PDF, it is using the Adobe PDF printer driver to reformat the job. My first suggestion is to change the printer for this job from your physical printer to Adobe PDF.

That will take care of the formatting. However, Acrobat will use the default page size to "print" the file. Therefore, the next step is to create a custom PDF Page Size.

Figure 1: Adobe PDF Properties dialog box.

1. On Windows: select Start > Printers and Faxes. Select Adobe PDF and select File > Properties. Select Printing Preferences from the General tab.

2. Select Adobe PDF Settings tab.

3. Select "Add" for PDF Page Size and create a page called "4x6" that is 4 x 6 in size.

4. Then when you print your job and select Adobe PDF – select Properties – and select 4x6 from the drop-down list.

Create PDF files from Microsoft Word
(Acrobat 6.0-7.0, Acrobat 3D on Windows)"
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/330729.html

— Lori

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