Preparing for 'printing' to PDF?

[terrypin]

I have the freeware version of PDF Creator so I can use Print To > PDF Creator from Word 2003. I hadn't used it (nor Word) for ages until the project that arose yesterday, so I may have missed something basic.



I had several documents. All took the form of a title followed by series of full width images interspersed with explanatory text. But the best PDF I could get usually looked like this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/ExamplePDF-1.jpg

I would have preferred to get right away from those A4 pages and see my material on essentially a continuous background, with much less vertical white space. The reader could then just scroll down.

I even tried using the custom paper size 'Continuous' in Word (which was anyway limited to the odd size of 57.67 cm, no idea why), but that got me in a worse mess.

No editing appears possible in PDF Creator, so it's up to me to get it right in Word first. Any advice would be appreciated please.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[macropod]

PDFs are page-based, so you need a page metaphor for them. You could, of course, reduce the top & bottom margins to 0. Even then, however, page-to-page scrolling will be at the mercy of the end-user's PDF-reader configuration.

You might also get better results using saving the documents as web (html) files.

[terrypin]

Thanks Paul. Yes, I realise now I was being a bit dumb, and that the clue was in the word 'Print'! I'd been regarding PDF Creator as a converter rather than a printer.

I already have all margins set to minimum (1 cm). So I'll experiment further with other formating in Word 2003. Including using a custom size the same width as an A4 (about 290 mm) but a smaller depth than 210 mm. There doesn't appear to be anything like that in the drop-down list of 'standards'. My aim is that with the PDF set to a view of 'whole page', the reader should not see an excessive amount of white space below the intended content.

I'm not sure how I'd use HTML in the forum for which these tutorials are intended, but I'll experiment with that too.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK