I have a 170 page Word document. I set this up so that I can "print" it to an Adobe PDF. To make sure that the appropriate pages are verso and recto, so that the document can print correctly, I like to review it by setting the magnification to show two pages side by side. Then I scroll down through the document.


That procedure has worked very well until recently. Now, while I am scrolling down, a page that is on the left side suddenly jumps to the right, and all of the following pages that should be on the left are also shown on the right side. I can still print to PDF with good results, but this behavior in Word is extremely disturbing, and it has not happened before.
If I scroll one page at a time there is no problem. But even with a small size, showing many pages at a time, this strange jumping around occurs.
Any other experiencing this?

If your document has odd/even Section page breaks, that could account for the behaviour.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for the suggestion. I think my problem is a more deep seated, and pathological problem. I have spent over an hour trying various combinations of section breaks, and that has no influence at all.
I did, however, discover that the page numbering does have an affect. If I let page numbering run unbroken from the start it has some affect. But that defeats the whole idea of using section breaks. There seems to be some bug in this at a particular place in the document. This only happens between the first and the second chapters. The way the pages flip over when scrolling is very bizarre. I think I will try to do this in Pages instead. I will report back if or when I find a solution.

I have discovered a strange occurrence when "printing" to Adobe PDF.
Blank pages appear in the PDF that were NOT in the original Word document. At least they were not visible. This has happened before, but at least it is easy to remove unwanted blank pages from a PDF. But I wonder if that has some influence on what is happening?
I have finally taken this Word document and split it into two: one document for the front matter, and a second document from, and including, the table of contents. That stopped the very strange page jumping. So I can combine the two documents into one single PDF. This should not be necessary. I have had no trouble doing all of this with other Word to PDF jobs before, so this is an aberration, and I believe that it is a bug in Word, which would not surprise me.
The blank pages popping up in a PDF, that were NOT in the Word file, is a mystery.

Your further descriptions confirm what I posted before - your document has odd/even page Section breaks. Since you're using those to ensure the page numbering follows the correct sequence, Word has to insert a blank page at print time to ensure the odd & even pages always occur on the same side of the paper (imagine a duplex printer). For a PDF, the same convention needs to be observed.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I tried several things
1. I got rid of all odd-even page breaks, substituting continuous breaks, and then blank pages before the break if needed. That did not help.
2. I started this document with 25 sections (chapters), and each section ran page numbers from the beginning, but without a page number on the first page of a section. The problem began when I started to put in the front matter. I wanted the main body of the book to have its own page numbering, and that is normal. Then I went back and instead ran page numbers right from the very first page, without changing any section breaks. That worked! No more pages jumping around. But that is not how I wanted to run page numbers. So I will just work with two documents. That at least works.
I have done this work before without these problems. But I think you are right, that there is something with section breaks. Somehow running page numbers right through all sections gets rid of the problem. The page numbers are in the footers, so maybe they need to be unlinked in some way. I did go back into the document and unlinked all headers and footers. That had no affect whatever.

Even without, odd/even next page Section breaks, it's quite possible that forcing the new Sections to start from a specified page # will have the same effect whenever the preceding Section ends on the same odd/even side the next Section starts with.

The behaviour is normal and reflects nothing more than Word trying to maintain a document output that is consistent with your page setup.

There is a way of having Word actually display the conditional blank pages, if you think that will help. The method involves the use of a field code at the end of each section to conditionally insert a page break if the page on which it occurs is an odd-numbered one:
{IF{=MOD({PAGE},2)}= 1 {QUOTE 12}}
or:
{IF{=MOD({PAGE},2)}= 1 "{QUOTE 12}¶
This page intentionally left blank¶
"}
To get the same effect for an even-numbered page, change the '1' to '0'.

Note: The field brace pairs (ie '{ }') for the above example are created in the body of the document via Ctrl-F9 (Cmd-F9 on a Mac) - you can't simply type them or copy & paste them from this message. Similarly, instead of the ¶, you should use real line/paragraph breaks.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul for your help.
I tried the code, but that produced no affect. I will admit that I am not good at some of this. However, it cannot possibly be normal for the pages to jump in an instant from one side of the screen to the other. I have done dozens of similar jobs without this happening. There is no reason that I should not be able to scroll through a two page set up. I have done that many times, in documents up to 300 pages long, with up to 40 sections, with the text body unlinked to the front matter. I normally have the front matter, 10 to 20 pages, set with Roman numerals, and the main body text starting at one with Arabic numerals. In this particular document the only thing that helped was to run numbering through from the very first page, and that should not be necessary.
Also, this page jump occurs at only one place in the document— between the first and second chapter. I tried putting several blank pages between the two chapters. That eliminated the page jump, but screwed up the page numbering. Maybe I will try that again, and then try to start the second chapter with the correct page number. It is easy to get rid of unwanted blank pages in the PDF. I will report back if I find anything new.

I went back for another go at this. I opened the troublesome document, and verified that the same page jumping was still occurring. I then verified that the front matter, 14 pages in this case, was all in one section. The following 25 sections were each in their own section. I do that for two reasons: I want to be able to add or subtract material in any chapter (section) without displacing all of the following text in subsequent chapters, and I want each chapter to start without a page number on the first page. That is standard practice. I still end up with an occasional number on a trailing even page that is blank, and I remove that lonely page number in Acrobat. The goal here is—no page number on the first page of a chapter, and no page number on a completely blank page.
Then I ran page numbers consecutively from the first page of the front matter through the entire document. That worked, and it stopped the page jumping, as I had experienced before. I still wanted to start the first chapter on page number one. This time, I put the cursor in the first page of the first chapter, and went to insert page number, and clicked on format, and clicked on start page at, and typed in 1, and left page number on first page blank. This time it worked! I did not change any section breaks at all. They remained the same as they had always been. And the pages no longer jump around, and the page numbering is just as I want it. I printed the document to Adobe PDF, and this time there were no strange blank pages showing up at all. The only thing left to do is to remove the page numbers in the front matter. I tried all of this with front matter pages formatted as Roman numerals, and that gave me the same problems as before, though it should be possible to do that. I actually prefer not to have any page numbers in the front matter, so I just remove them in Acrobat.
Another strange thing I discovered; this particular document has two pages of endnotes—the last two pages in the document. The last page is an odd number page, on the left side. I have to end the document with an even number of pages, as the printer requires that. I tried to insert a blank page after the page with the endnotes. That cannot be done. The program has, in some way, reserved that page for endnotes, and there was no way I could put in a blank page at the end. But I can easily put in a blank page at the end in Acrobat. There is no option in Acrobat to insert a blank page, as there is to delete a page. But I always have a single blank page PDF, made from a single blank page in Word. It is necessary, when doing that, to first format the blank page, even though nothing at all is on it. I format my pages to 6x9 inches. Otherwise you get a page in Acrobat that does not fit into the other pages.
So, this problem has been solved for me. I still think that there is something buggy in Word's page numbering machine. I tried many ways of linking and unlinking headers and footers, and different ways of inserting page numbers. That it suddenly worked so well was a pleasant surprise.