border not showing

[eNGiNe]

I have a document using the border property for the first paragraph in the footer – but the border doesn't show up on screen, or when printing. If I apply the same style to a paragraph in the body of the page, the border displays correctly.

It looks as though there's plenty of space in the footer area – see screenshot – and the style is defined with 20pt space before.

Any ideas?



[out of curiosity: when "Valid file extensions: doc docx gif jpe jpeg jpg pdf png ppt pptx txt xls xlsm xlsx zip", why does the attachment manager say I've attached a .jpg?

[Stefan Blom]

Which kind of border? If it's the bottom border, the likely explanation is that it disappears into the nonprinting area at the bottom of the page.

[eNGiNe]

Top border …

[Stefan Blom]

Have you tried changing the settings for the border? In particular, look at the "From text" settings in the Border and Shading Options dialog box. Does that improve the situation?

[eNGiNe]

Two styles with similar border settings, both of them using 1pt as the distance. Body text OK, footer not …

[Stefan Blom]

OK, there is nothing apparently odd about the settings. Could you upload an example document (remove any sensitive information)?

[macropod]

I am unable to reproduce the problem here, using Office 2010 in 32-bit mode. The issue may be that your printer driver is unable to handle the border, so Word doesn't display it.

[eNGiNe]

I don't think it can be the printer driver, given that using the same style in the page body does show the line – here's a screenshot showing the Footer Odd style in use both in body text and in the footer.

[macropod]

The mere fact your printer can handle borders in the body of the document isn't proff it can do the same for the footers.

Unless you upload an example document as Stefan suggested, there's nothing much more either of us is likely to be able to contribute to a solution.

[eNGiNe]

Now with attachments!

• some pages extracted from the docx
• some pages from the same docx as .pdf – clear absence of border in footer
• some pages from another system as .pdf – border behaving as required, both on screen and on paper

Note that sending the .fm file and the .docx file to the same physical printer gives the same results as output to .pdf; so the printer does appear capable of rendering that type of border. Baffling!

N

[ps/disclaimer] I inherited the .docx well into its life ;-}

[macropod]

Hi eNGiNe,

I opened your Word document and checked the odd & even footers. Neither had the top border applied! I applied them to the Styles and everything's fine. See attached.

[eNGiNe]

Well, thanks for your trouble; I agree that not having a border defined would be a pretty convincing reason … but my April 9 screenshots show that something, persistently, wasn't working. I'll add it to my checklist for each time files come back from reviewers/contributors ;-} and consider locking down styles before letting files out in the first place.

[macropod]

I suspect that what you were looking at was the Style definition, rather than the actual paragraph format (i.e. the Style formatting had been over-ridden). You can fix this kind of thing by checking Word's 'Automatically update document Styles' option, under Developer|Document Template>Templates.