Wow, I didn't realize there was continued discussion on this. I must have the option off for the forum to email me if anyone replies. I will have to try some of the newer things mentioned in this thread & see if they work any better than where I am now (see below). Thanks for the continued help.
I came back here now to say that I was able to finally get this to work for me! Although what I am doing I don't exactly understand, just that it works.
First I overcame the problem where I was getting an image cut off on one side - to fix that I adjusted the page margins on the cover doc to match my full document.
That still left me with only one method that keeps the formatting - using PASTE SPECIAL then selecting Microsoft Word Object to make the cover page some kind of big image instead of word doc format.
But the killer gotcha I could not get around was that if I converted the document to PDF the fonts in the cover page get futzed up.
Finally I decided to take a look at what the font is that is being used and to change it to something else that looks similar to see if a different font might convert better.
I discovered that the font that was getting screwed up was called "Times". This made me curious since I've never seen this fontname on my PC before - what I am more used to seeing is the TT (truetype) font called TimesNewRoman.
I don't understand what "Times" is exactly but it is NOT in the pulldown choice of installed fonts on my PC in Word. I think this means that it is a font not installed on my PC - but must be on the PC that made the cover page??? But somehow Word on my PC knows enough about it to handle it but the PDF converter process doesn't!!
When I convert it to PDF (using OpenOffice) that does not know what to do with this font. By simply changing the font in the original cover document to TimesNewRomain, THEN doing a PasteSpecial of the cover page into my document as word-doc-object, THEN converting the new document - it works and looks ok. Plus the TT TimesnewRomain on my PC looks identical to this unknown "Times" font.
Again, I don't exactly understand what "Times" is, where it came from, how it works in Word on my PC but won't convert right, but at least I found a workaround, also this is a really good learning experience which I will not soon forget. From now if I run into this again I will be carefully checking the fonts used in any docs given to me.
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