Any MS Publisher experts out there?

[WoodenFlugel]

Hi all,

I'm trying to get my band's newsletter out (deadline: tomorrow - oops!) and have run across a slightly bizarre problem that I can't solve. The newsletter is 8 pages long, and is printed on A3, folded and stapled. Looking through the normal publisher window, everything is fine, but when I send it to my pdf writer (CUTE .pdf) to repaginate and print on the A3 sheet I get images from pages 6 & 7 appearing on pages 2 & 3.

I've tried everything I can think of - the images appear to be attached to the right pages, they are not on the master page, moving them, resizing them etc doesn't make any difference. If I move pages 6 & 7 to be page 4 & 5 (ie the centre pages) the problem goes away. Also if I delete the images they disappear from both locations so it doesn't appear to be a copied image.

I've never come across this before (I've been doing the newsletter on Publisher for about a year now) and I've run out of ideas - even shouting at the PC and calling MicroSoft's parentage into question doesn't work!

Can anyone help? BTW I'm running Publisher 2003 on Windows XP.

(sorry for the rubbish quality - I had to put quite a bit of compression onto the pictures to get them to upload, but you should get the general gist)

[Anno Draconis]

Now you know why printers loathe Publisher with a visceral passion :rolleyes:

Have you checked whether the pics that are "moving" have been accidentally grouped with images on the the page next to them? I know that's a "have you turned it on" helpdesk kind of answer but it's easily done in Publisher.

Have you used the "page setup" to set the document as a booklet? Because that feature is utter cack in Publisher and always causes problems in my experience - better either to set your pages up in the right order for booklet printing from the start, or use the "booklet" feature in your PDF creator - I don't know if CutePDF has one but most do.

Speaking of which; I have the luxury of doing this stuff in InDesign and simply exporting to PDF, well worth looking on eBay for a copy if you get chance. In the meantime, if I had to use a free PDF converter my weapon of choice would be PrimoPDF (http://www.primopdf.com/) 'cos it's an absolute doddle to install and use, and the "book" setting seem to handle this sort of stuff with ease.

If you get really stuck you could always create 4 documents and just copy and paste your pages in - 8&1 in document 1, 2&7 in document 2, etc. Ache in the goolies, I know, but if you need to get it done today.......;)

[WoodenFlugel]

Thanks for the response Andy.

Its not the grouping - I've grouped, ungrouped, regrouped and degrouped everything on those pages and it has no effect whatsoever.

I do use the "booklet" settings to re-order the pages, and you're right - its a complete pain in the backside - the settings to make it work never seem to be the same every time I do it. I don't think CUTE pdf has any booklet feature - its pretty basic and it may be that that is a cause of the problems (we use it at work and it doesn't always behave itself). I'll try downloading PrimoPDF when I'm home tonight to see if that solves it.

I'm also well aware of printer's views of Publisher - the guy that prints it for me is less than charitable about it, and when I spoke to him on Saturday about this problem his reply was "so are you gonna start using a decent program from now on...". I may do, but the pain is that I've invested a fair bit of time getting the Publisher template how I want it, and now I'm probably going to have to redo it all again :mad:

In the meantime I can give him the Publisher-native file, but this will mean extra work for him and as I get this done at a special rate I don't want to make a habit of it.

Anyway - thanks for the pointers Andy, anyone got anymore ideas?

[mikelyons]

I don't mean to be unhelpful, but I never use publisher for anything more complicated than burthday cards. If you can do it easily, copy everything to word and use that instead. There are still quirks and stupid problems, but I've not yet found anything that I couldn't do with it.