I have a very large Word 2003 document with lots of section breaks and page numbering changes. Stuff has been inserted, especially at the beginning.
Suddenly, I’ve found that the real page numbering of the document is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13… 7 and 11 are missing in the numbering scheme. If I save the document to pdf, 7 and 11 print out as blank pages.
Both occur after next page section breaks. Those are necessary to keep the internal header/footer numbering proper.
I’ve replaced the section breaks, and inserted them at different points with extra spaces, and eliminated them, and repaged and whatever I could think of.
One possibility is an extra hard page break. Do a Find on ^m to see if there are any in the document that could be causing the problems.
Another possibility is a bunch of paragraphs formatted to be kept on the same page as the next. The way to to check that is to go to a paragraph, then choose Format – Paragraph, then go to the “Line and Page Breaks” tab to see if the box is ticked. If it is, click on the box to untick it.
No extra hard page break, and I had already made sure those boxes were unchecked.
Continuous page breaks would screw up the footers. They are next page breaks. They are definitely not even page breaks though. I tried changing them to continuous but it didn’t help.
Sometimes, if you’ve tried everything you can think of, you can pull a Hail Mary and “maggie” the document* (or, better, a test copy of it just in case of finger-fumbles): select the entire file EXCEPT the very last paragraph mark, copy the selection, and paste into a new document. I’ve never had to fix a section problem, but I’m told that this works for sections too: copy everything but the last paragraph mark in the SECTION, paste into a new doc, and repeat for each succeeding section.
*Named after, though not invented/discovered by, the editor who popularized this trick.
It’s a little-known fact, one I discovered today by perusing help documents, that Word stores all its formatting information for a section inside the last paragraph mark in that section.
Following this advice does work for the pagination.
It also turns certain footers invisible.
I’m just going to go beat my head against a wall for awhile.
You could try posing your question at the Word-PC list. They’re some serious Word gurus over there, and this question sounds right up their alley.
(How large is large? I wonder if Word is just choking on the size. Can you break it up into separate docs? Which brings to mind another question: This doesn’t involve the use of a Master Document, does it? Those are notorious for causing corruption. I don’t even know what one is or how to create one, but from all the disaster stories I’ve read, I know to stay the hell away from them.)
Oh, and here’s a cushion for your head. Don’t want a concussion now.
After going back and re-entering the footnotes, over and over, and redoing the footnotes, and correcting several other problems introduced in the copying process, like spacing, I think I finally got every bit locked into place. Now a revision to one minor section that I hope will stay exactly the same number of pages so absolutely nothing moves and it’s done.
Thanks for the tip, Scarlett67. It was just what I needed.
How so? Can you explain what you mean by this? I would try deleting all carriage returns and formatting (tabs, etc.) around where you are inserting the page breaks, and then replacing them. If you drastically adjust the page margins, does this behavior continue?
I meant that I have a section with no headers/footers; then a section with, numbered in roman numerals; then a section with no; then a section with, using arabic numbers starting from a certain page. I don’t understand how you would do that with continuous section breaks or with simple page breaks and have that various h/f formatting change at the right spots. That’s what next page section breaks are for, as far as I understand Word.
But as I said, I got all that to work, by the maggie method and then re-entering the footers over and over. (I said footnotes previously, but that was a separate issue I had to deal with.)
