Agreed that the PDF format should ensure consistency. I can't imagine what's
causing the problem in your case. What application are you using to do the
conversion? You mention Adobe Reader, which suggests you don't have Acrobat.
As for content vs. layout, I do usually have some layout in mind, or the
author whose work I'm typing/typesetting has indicated a layout, but often I
have to tweak the layout many times, and the author may have been wildly
inconsistent in numbering items or assigning heading levels, and that has to
be straightened out. If a document is very complex, I may have to experiment
at some length to get it right. For example, I worked on one book that
included, in addition to the narrative text, long extracts from a diary and
letters and other sources. The long diary extracts included block quotes; if
I indented the extracts themselves, and then further indented the block
quotes within them, the text column (already only 4.75" inches, since this
was an octavo volume) would become undesirably narrow, so I made the
decision to use a different font for the long extracts and indent only the
block quotes within them. For the letters I used Bradley Hand, the best
compromise I could find between a "handwriting" font and legibility. But all
these choices were experimented with and refined over the course of the job,
as I became more familiar with what I was working with.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
"Bert Coules" wrote in message
o.uk...
Suzanne,
I prefer to do the writing or typing first and determine the layout
later.
Ah, you see, I can't work like that. I have to do content and layout
simultaneously.
As for the PDFs, it appears that it is not the printable area that is
shrinking but the print area...
I think I see what you mean. Certainly, I can print a page from a Word
document and have it come out exactly as I intend; but if I convert it to
PDF (and I've tried several different conversion programs, all with the
same result) then the shrinkage occurs.
...are you sure you're printing with "No scaling"?
Thanks for the thought, but yes, I'm completely sure.
Could this be a result of printing to a specific printer?
Ah, I've no way of checking that, having only the one. Besides which, the
whole point of looking into converting to PDF was so that documents could
be emailed and printed by someone else with the formatting intact: if the
results differ from printer to printer then the approach isn't worth my
pursuing.
Bert