word table borders displaying erratically in PDF

Report · Mar 20, 2018

I am having some issues with Table borders in the finished PDF.

OS: Win10

Word--Office 365 ProPlus

Acrobat 11.0.23

Have a file with a table. The table has borders. When I PDF the doc and open the PDF, random horizontal borders are missing. They print properly, though.

Same result with using the PDF printer and the Word Save as PDF plugin.

There are multiple posts with similar issues, but I haven't seen any solutions.

Here's how the table looks in Word:

Here's how it looks in Acrobat (And Reader, and MS Edge):

Any suggestions?

Report · Jun 01, 2024

You're welcome! Glad it helped. 🙂

Report · Oct 03, 2023

This worked! Thank you!

Report · Jun 01, 2024

You're most welcome. I really appreciate all the people who have bothered to thank me. 🙂

Report · Jun 19, 2019

Me as well . . . I thought it was maybe a Macintosh issue, but when I looked up the problem, I noticed MANY posts about this—one in particular noting that the problem has existed since 2004 (I'm sure before, but maybe he's referencing it being an issue noted on the forum). Any many of the people were Windows users. The two strings I followed for assistance/suggestions:

As it is really a presentation/screen problem which I'm assuming Adobe cannot control and does not know how to address so they stay quiet hoping people figure out a work-around, or realize it's not an *actual* problem (PDF and Word Doc I have print out just fine), merely visual. What I did do to help some of the border inconsistencies go away leaving only the most minute, barely noticeable issues on the onscreen viewed PDF, was to recreate the tables fresh and type the content back in myself. As I had many tables that were similar, I did this once, and then used the upper left corner selection icon, when hovering over that part of the table, to copy the entire thing and then manually make content adjustments. I did this because I realize that when you copy and paste in MS docs, it copies much formatting in the background which the user is not intending to paste. This did result in many border issues when we had copied the content of a top header row, into the cells of a secondary header row to make one row (in an effort to pass accessibility, which likes one header row, one header column!). When I recreated these tables and typed in directly rather than copy/pasting data, much of the border problems ceased to subsist. I also set that one table that was copied (different than copy/pasting data from within table cells), to border width of .75 points, which wasn't too big and ugly, but made the borders look more solid. Just my 2 cents! Hope it helps.

Report · Sep 17, 2020

I had a similar issue while converting word document to pdf. I tried different options, it dint work as the word doc looked fine but pdf had issues. So I used the table tools for border and selected all the cells facong this line/border issue and selected the option of all all borders under the dropdown of Borders. This made all the cells bordered witht the default border. U can now change the border specs using a format painer. Dont know how and why it works internally, but it does. Hope it helps.

Report · Nov 27, 2020

This is an adobe issue - if you go to Acrobat Preferences, Page Display and then UNCHECK Enhance thin lines this will force acrobat to display the lines properly - so your pdfs from word, powerpoint etc should look correct.

Report · Dec 10, 2020

Great - thanks - this one worked for me.

Report · Aug 05, 2021

This is an easy fix, thanks for this!

Report · Apr 20, 2022

Two solutions that have worked well for me:

1) Set all table/cell margins to 0 and then use line spacing to achieve the desired result. (Suggested by Luke Grayson)

2) Save file as .odt > open file with LibreOffice > save as PDF (this could be quicker if you have lots of tables which you don't want to have to adjust spacing etc.)

Report · Feb 22, 2023

LibreOffice method did it for me! Thanks,

Didnt have to mess around with modifying my tables, which were all done intentionally with spacing and margins to make it look right. Wish Office would fix this. Thanks to LibreOffice for the solution here