I have made a book in MS Word 2016, and printed to pdf for sending to a printer for printing. After the title page and some other pages, MSW's pdf generating tool has added blank pages. The pdf needs to be an exact replica of the original MSW file. If there are blank pages added, there may be other changes as well. How can I create a pdf which will be an exact copy of my original MSW file.

If you printed it, it likely would have the same blank pages.
Best guess is that you followed good practice and put an odd-page section break before chapter breaks. When the document prints if the previous page was odd-numbered a blank page will be generated.


If you look, my guess is that the pagination is exactly the same as the Word document.

You give me too much credit :-)

I didn't put an odd-page section break before chapter breaks. What I do is to put a "next page section break" at the end of each chapter, as well as at the end of the preface, Editors Note, and other such sections.

But I am referring to the very first 4 pages of the book. The pdf is interspersing a blank page between each of these first 4 pages. I do not want to print all those blank pages, nor do I want those blank pages in the book. They are not in the original MSW file, so shouldn't there be some way for them to not be in the pdf either? You are correct, all the pagination is proper. But these blank pages should not be there and I need to know why they came and how to get rid of them.

Turn on display of non-printing formatting characters.
Showing non-printing formatting marks in Microsoft Word
Word's Reveal Formatting Codes


There should be no need of those section breaks. Instead, use Page-Break-Before paragraph formatting on the paragraph (heading?) you use to start a new page unless you have some reason for a section break.


If you want, save those first four pages in a separate file and post it here. How to attach a screenshot or file in this forum.



Also, check with your publisher. Standard book publishing calls for new chapters to begin on an odd-numbered page (on the right side).

Thanks! At that time I got it worked out, don't recall any more exactly what I did.

Now though I have the book all set to go to press, and again I find that there are some blank pages when I print to the pdf. There are two places where it is happening:

1) After the title page and before the publishers page, a blank page is getting generated when I print to pdf. There is no such blank page in the MSW file. When I click to show the paragraph marks and other special symbols, I do not see anything there that would cause a blank page to appear here. There is no page break, no section break, nothing. The only mark I see is a greyed out paragraph symbol at the top left corner of the publishers page. It cannot be highlighted or removed. I don't know whether that may be related with it?

2) The same is occurring before the TOC. A blank page is there, in the absence of any page break, section break, etc.

3) I actually want a blank page at the end of the TOC so that the preface will begin on an odd page. To that end I had placed an odd-page section break. In my MSW file it looked perfect-- one blank page, followed by the preface starting on an odd page. But when I printed to pdf, there was not one but three blank pages in that location. So I removed the odd-page section break, and now it is printing only one blank page. Here I actually want the blank page. But having removed the odd-page section break, I do not understand why there is a blank page here when I print to PDF. Anyhow, I need one here so it is fine!

I need to get rid of these two blank pages described above before sending to the printer, and I've spent hours trying to figure out what is going on with them, why they are there, and how to get rid of them. They are driving me crazy...

Blank pages get added because of the odd and/or even page section breaks if the page number requires it.

Change the section breaks types to resolve where necessary.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

In the two places where I am getting blank pages, there are no section breaks of any kind. Please see updated description above. And it is the first 4-5 pages of the book, so there are no section breaks prior to the problem locations either. It is a mystery to me why I am getting blank pages in those locations.

You are not seeing any section breaks. That does not mean they are not there.


Two tools:

• View your document in Draft view where you are having problems
• Word Toolkit for Advanced Management of Headers and Footers

That last is a free download. Only works in Windows. It will give you a good look at every section break in your document, whether you can see them or not.

Have you got any tracked revisions in your document? When section breaks are marked as deleted, they might not appear in some views but they are still in the document.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Yes, amazing. As per Charles' recommendation I went into Draft view, and there I found section breaks which were not showing up in Print view even when I selected the option to have all hidden symbols show. I removed those section breaks, and now everything is perfect. I guess, as Andrew mentions here, "When section breaks are marked as deleted, they might not appear in some views but they are still in the document." This was really something new for me. Very complex! Now that I am aware of this, it will be extremely helpful going forward. Thanks to you both.

I had to do a lot of things by hand with this book that I would have preferred to have done using the MSW system, but due to lack of familiarity with its intricacies had no option. Index, TOC, and various aspects of formatting of the body of the book all done by hand. A large part of this was related to the complexity resulting from using two languages in the book each with their own font and font size, and having these mixed down to the sentence level throughout the book. I hope to figure these things out for the next book....

Glad you got it figured out.


Start here (even if it seems like it is stuff you already know or don't need). It should take less than half a day to go through all of her articles and you will save yourself untold grief.


Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly


It isn't the things we don't know that cause problems, it is the things we don't know that we don't know - our assumptions - that cause problems.