word table borders displaying erratically in PDF

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.)

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.

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:

• https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/717b093b-62c0-473a-8351-5c750b8ab071/convert-word-table-to-pdf-missingincorrect-linesborders-issue-since-at-least-2004?forum=word
• https://forums.adobe.com/thread/978767

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.

I had this issue as well. Bloody annoying. Adobe doesn't care. They never have and they never will. Customer service is not a priority to them. Only money is.

But I do have a solution that might work - it worked for me. It looks like you have top and bottom padding set on the cells. Try setting that to 0pt and instead using line spacing (Paragraph > Spacing (Before / After) to create the padding effect. This immediately solved my problem. Having said that I'm also using thick borders - 1 1/2 pt.

Unfortunately, by the time either Acrobat's PDFMaker, the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance, or even Microsoft's built-in “save as PDF” gets the content, the formatting is already baked-in. In all cases, Word (and for that matter Excel and PowerPoint) create a Windows EMF stream from the original contents which is then used for print or PDF creation.

What can you try?

(1)     One long-shot solution would be to adjust the setting for the current / default printer within Word to a significantly higher resolution. This may cause Office to allow a thinner line specification in the output. But I something think that this might not work.

(2)     Byte the bullet and increase the width of the table border lines.

          - Dov