I’m coming to the conclusion that what I’m asking for isn’t possible but wonder if anyone here can surprise me. I'm working on a long (70pp) Word MS doc which I would like to turn into a PDF that would be a continuous sheet: an ebook, not for printing, navigable by scrolling and internal links). Even a dotted line would not do. Setting the top and bottom margins at zero and clicking to remove the page breaks doesn’t help and the maximum setting for the height of a page in Word appears to be 55.87cm.




Though not necessary to any solution I’ll just explain why I want this outcome. The document consists of about 40 ‘entries’ each relating to a piece of music and consisting of a shaded portion (track info + picture) followed by standard text (my commentary). My wish is to avoid both (b) the white spaces that would result from beginning each entry on a fresh page and (b) the shaded ‘blocks’ (some almost half a page high) splitting over two pages, which is what I’d get were the entries to be run on.


I’ll doubtless end up filling the white spaces with more pictures but before doing so want to make sure my ideal outcome is outside the realm of the possible. Thanks in advance for any brains cells expended, even by anyone not replying.

Since PDF is a substitute for a normal paper document, I do not know of long continuous pages. What you want could be a web page, but if that is converted to PDF, you will still get page breaks.

And doubtless that would be the case whatever I tried, making this a PDF rather than Word thing. If I could get rid of that pesky dotted line in PDF I'd be happy. Thanks for the response.

Since PDFs use a page layout, you're not going to get away from some representation of that in the PDF format, no matter what you do. Word will support page sizes up to 22in*22in. You could possibly use that as a starting point with a very small font and a custom paper size to shoehorn all you content into a single page. When viewed at screen width (regardless of whether converted to PDF), you'd see the lot as a single stream with no page breaks.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Well I may give that a try tomorrow (late here) but I think I may be better just accepting the inevitable - it's not as though my alternative (extra images) is a bad solution.



Your kindness in responding, and your expertise, are much appreciated.


Fin

Would you not achieve your aims by setting each section to begin on a new page and squash the content only enough to make the largest section fit on a page. Then make the PDF and crop the pages to remove whitespace. You will end up with a variable height for every page in the PDF but it would be viewable as a continuous flow without your described issues.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure I quite follow it, though that probably has to do with the fact that I'm competent in Word rather than anything approaching a wizard. I take it your 'sections' are my 'entries', rather than sections in the Word sense. But what do you mean by 'squashing' the content, and does this refer to the longest 'entry' (nearly five pages) or the whole thing?



To prepare to test this I've made a version consisting only of two shorter entries and (in the middle) the very long one, but would need your clarification of what it is you have in mind before I can give it a go.

Yes, the sections I was talking about are the 'entries', not Word sections. Assuming you have used styles, change the attributes of the first paragraph style in each entry so that it has a page break before.

Then change the page setup of the entire document so that the page is 55cm tall (or whatever the maximum size you can get to stick). It is likely your 5 page chunk won't fit so you will need to modify the styles to tighten the content until that chunk just fits on one page. Once you have done that, do a SaveAs to PDF.

Open the PDF in Acrobat Reader and verify the look is OK apart from the whitespace on some of the pages. The next step is to use a different tool to crop the PDF pages that have whitespace on the bottom. Acrobat Reader can't do this but plenty of other tools can like Adobe Acrobat or Nuance Power PDF. If you don't have a tool that can edit PDFs, you could either download one or post your sample on this forum and I can trim it so you can see if that is the result you want.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I begin to wonder whether the game is worth the candle but I will give it a go - if only because you've been good enough to set this out - until I find myself out of my depth. I haven't set out to use styles (though I note one is in force through most of the doc) and don't understand them well enough to tinker without wrecking all the careful formatting contained in the blocks for each of the 40 entries. Because the document is intended as a showcase for my writing and I need to have it ready to use sooner rather than later, what I might end up doing is making a version with extra images then revisit it to see if I can get your instructions to work, next time i return to it. (The thing is stuffed full of links that I intend to maintain up-to-date on a quarterly or even monthly basis, so I will always be tweaking and re-converting.)
I really appreciate your input and thanks for laying it out so clearly. I'll actually be sending it to a pro friend who does a lot of e-book conversion work and asked me to let her know if I managed to get anywhere with this.