how do I preserve formatting of word doc or docx when emailing? Text is written in word [downloaded from microsoft] and looks fine on my mac but is totally adrift when it reaches the recipient. PDF transfers fine but is not always acceptable.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
The recipient needs to open the file with Word in order to keep your Word formatting.
If the recipient does not have a compatible version of Word, PDF is the option that will preserve formatting.
Also make sure to use standard common fonts which are available by default on all devices to help minimize compatibility issues.
PDF is the only method of being able to read a document without effort. Even when using MS Office, users must be using compatible versions.
Thanks,
.doc or .docx is all the specification given, so which version is unknown. PDF used to be commonly accepted in most places but is now less frequently used. Seems daft to me that there isn't overall compatibility.
rtf is less problematical but again is not much used by publishers.
dmwriter wrote:
totally adrift when it reaches the recipient.
Normally you should not have that problem when using Word Mac to create your .doc. Could you provide some details about what is going wrong.
You could also try LibreOffice, a free Word clone, which can also produce Word format.
dmwriter wrote:
Thanks,
.doc or .docx is all the specification given, so which version is unknown. PDF used to be commonly accepted in most places but is now less frequently used. Seems daft to me that there isn't overall compatibility.
rtf is less problematical but again is not much used by publishers.
Both .doc and .docx are Word formats. .doc is the older of the 2. Both can be opened with newer versions of Microsoft Word. PDF is used ubiquitously for users who want to preserve formatting.
Thanks for your response.
The main problem is with poems. When I submit a group of poems each poem requires a separate page but doesn't necessarily fill a full page so the page breaks don't transfer consistently. It means that a new poem which I have started at the top of a page often comes out half way down instead of at the top. It's the same with libreoffice and open office and is driving me mad. It seems I'm not the only one, below is a thread from another site but no one seems to have the answer.
When I convert from Pages to Word, and then read the conversion, the page breaks are not in the same place. The conversion in .docx has more lines to the page than the original. In reading the .docx I am of course converting it back to Pages, since I don’t have Word installed, but I assume that the .docx version also has more lines to the page than the Pages original.
Inserting page breaks in the original does not help (and would not be much of a solution for a document of any size).
.pdf gives an exact copy, but sometimes I need to export to Word
Thank you,
I assumed it was the same as in pages I simply spaced down until I reached a new page. Is this not so? It's years since I've used word and the problem is only recent, previously converting pages to word on MacAir worked ok.
Yes you could within a Word document insert a bunch of returns to force a page break but that seems like the difficult way to do it. And as you've discovered the result is not preserved when exporting to Word. Just put your cursor at the end of your poem and select insert page break.
Or check with the Microsoft Word Help Community to see if there are other options:
If you want a page break in a specific location in a document there is a Word menu option to insert page break, How else would you expect Word to know where you want page breaks?
Thanks I'll try that.
It's a real pain.
Formatting problems
