View Single Post
  #3   Report Post  
Charlie''s Word VBA questions
 
Posts: n/a
Default Word 97 in Windows XP to maintain formatting

Thank you, Graham.
In fact, the old printer driver (HP) is installed on the XP machine as well
as a new (Canon) printer driver. I have switched back and forth between
printers, with "Use printer metrics" both On and Off. While I could
sometimes see very minor differences in the display, that did not resolve the
problem. And yet, a very small difference such as right indenting a test
paragraph by -.05" solved the problem for that one paragraph. I guess I
don't really understand how Word uses the printer to format the display and
print.
I also tried to install the old Arial font after renaming it "OldArial", but
Windows was smart enough to prevent it. I also took a snapshot of a test
paragraph on both machines and viewed them at 10x zoom. I didn't see any
differences in the pixels for each letter nor for spacing between letters.
It was just a guess on my part.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

This is nothing to do with any difference between the file formats of Word
97 and Word 2003 (which are effectively the same) but with the fact that
different printer drivers (and possibly different releases of the font
files) were used to create the documents. Word formats according to the
current printer driver. You would have to have the same printer driver (and
I mean the driver not the printer) and font outlines present as when you
created the document in Word 97. Adding Word 97 to your current installation
will not affect the issue.
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Charlie''s Word VBA questions wrote:
Can I install Word 97 in Windows XP? I have Office 2003 with Word
2003 already installed.
However, I have many 97 documents that, when opened on 2003, line
spacing and text formatting is sufficiently changed to cause many,
many problems. These are student workbooks with font sizes of 12 and
14 points. Words on a line flow to the next line causing
paragraph/page overflow. Sometimes a word actually fits on the line
above. These documents contain a lot of formulas and programming
code examples so formatting and spacing is very precise and critical.
Even text forming formulas and program code in a table may overflow
resulting in misalignment of lines that must be precisely aligned. I
have tried every option I can think of including all compatibility
options as Word 6.0, 97 and 2003, with printer metrics turned on and
off. The only fixes I have come up with are doing things like
reducing font size by .5 point, setting paragraph right indent by
even as little as negative .05 inches. But I would have to do this
line by line or paragraph by paragraph. I spent nearly a week just
finding (But not yet correcting) problems in ten documents.
I am considering installing Word 97 to solve this problem (although I
am not sure it will). What conflicts will I encounter? Can I keep
2003 and 97? Is there any other way to "freeze" spacing?