PDF writer that comes with Office

[Pat Hartman]

I just ran into a really strange bug and would love alternative solutions. I am testing a printing/restart process that automates Word and am tired of actually printing the documents and throwing away all the paper. So, I got the bright idea of setting the PDF writer as the default printer. Well, it seemed to work. The letters all got "printed" to the PDF but when I open it up, none of the bookmarks are filled in If I print the documents to a real printer or simply preview them, the bookmarks fill fine. It is only when the PDF is defined as the printer that the fields are empty.

Any Ideas?

 

[Simon_MT]

Try SaveAs pdf (Office Add-On) and change the Options > Include non-Printing information > Create Bookmarks Using > Word Bookmarks.

Simon

 

[PNGBill]

Good luck on your saving paper. and filing.
We stopped printing on paper some 8 years ago and never regretted it. pdf is our default printer.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Simon, Thanks anyway but there is no human interaction during the process so I can't do what you are suggesting. Bookmarks print fine when the destination is a real printer.

 

[Simon_MT]

There does seem to be a way of automating it:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5822719_retain-bookmarks-convert-word-pdf.html

Simon

 

[Pat Hartman]

Thanks for that. I'm using the free PDF writer that ships with Office 2010. It is called Lightning. Its settings tab shows a "bookmarks" option but it doesn't do anything. As soon as I save the PDF, the bookmark values disappear. This method wouldn't work for me anyway unless it remembered the settings. The documents are not previewed. They are "printed". The printer they print to is the pdf writer which is supposed to act just like a printer but apparently it does not.
I think I understand what causes this bug not that I can do anything about it. The handoff from word to the pdf writer doesn't seem to be a graphical file as it is with a printer, it seems to be the original document which of course has "empty" bookmarks and my code doesn't run a second time to populate them.

 

[Pat Hartman]

PNGBill, are you sending bookmarked documents to the pdf writer? I can't even do them one-off with Lightning. As soon as I select "create pdf", the values disappear from the bookmarks.

 

[Simon_MT]

If I recall correctly, a PDF file is in a postscript format perhaps this maybe worth a try and print to file.

Simon

 

[PNGBill]

PNGBill, are you sending bookmarked documents to the pdf writer? I can't even do them one-off with Lightning. As soon as I select "create pdf", the values disappear from the bookmarks.

No, sorry Pat, we use the ms Access 2010 pdf writer and save the report as a .pdf
std code.

DoCmd.OpenReport "RptStatementNewStyle", acViewPreview, , strWhere
    DoCmd.OutputTo acOutputReport, "RptStatementNewStyle", acFormatPDF, "W:\Attachments\" & FullName & " Loan " & LoanRef & " Loan Statement " & TeamMember & ".pdf", 0, , , acExportQualityPrint

Acrobat and Nuance are our default printers when we do need to manually "print" a document and save to hdd.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I've never run into this before because I've also just printed reports to a PDF. And, I only discovered this bug because I was trying to avoid killing trees just to test. I'm going to see if I can get an answer from Microsoft if I don't get a solution in a day or two.

If I recall correctly, a PDF file is in a postscript format perhaps this maybe worth a try and print to file.

I don't have any way of intercepting this. And besides that, I can't permanently change the process because the client actually wants to print the documents. All 8,000 if that's how many letters he needs to mail. I don't want to actually print them because I'm just testing. "Printing" to the PDF gives me an accurate count but I would like to actually see which employees got letters so I can verfiy my selection criteria.