How to stop format change when converting a Word 2016 document to Acrobat Pro? (PLEASE HELP)

The problem of Microsoft Office applications (not only Word, but Excel and Powerpoint) reformatting text has plagued these products well over 25 years. These reformatting issues include differences in line breaks, differences in line spacing, and resultant pagination issues.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing that Adobe can do to fix this since by the time either the Adobe PDFMaker plugin for Office gets content or for that matter the PostScript driver gets content (such as for printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance), the reformatting has already been done by Microsoft.

Factors in these issues include the fact that although Microsoft externally refers to points (1/72 inch, 72 points per inch), internally a 1/96 inch, 96 units per inch coordinate system is used (this hearkens back to the screen resolution of early VGA monitors). Thus, there are all sorts of round-off errors that occur in layout when trying to reconcile 1/72 inch with 1/96 inch. Generally speaking, you are best off using text point sizes that are multiples of 6 points, i.e. 6 pt, 12 pt, 18 pt, etc. to avoid round-off errors. Also, for spacing, specify exact spacing in terms of points as opposed to lines or multiples of lines.

Microsoft are looks at the output resolution of the “current printer” selected for positioning. Thus, if you have multiple printer drivers or even a printer with different resolutions available, line layout will possibly differ based on that. Change the output device resolution and you may see reformatting. I try to keep all my local printers, including the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance set for 600dpi for consistency and to avoid reformatting surprises.

Good luck!

          - Dov

I ended up painstakingly moving each little box that automatically went down from where it was sent after the conversion to where it originally was. So I've fixed what was needed but the problem still seemingly exists.

What method of PDF creation/conversion are you using?  Assuming you have Acrobat PRO, the PDF Maker (on the Acrobat ribbon in Word) would usually yield the best conversion.  Printing to PDF, not usually as good, and export/save as PDF generally the worst fidelity to your original document.  With all that said, there are a number of ways to turn your Word doc into a PDF, and I would try them all.  Maybe one will produce what you want.

I hope this is helpful. My best,

Dave