print to PDF yields multiple documents

When outputting a book that has special formatting for pages that are chapter starts, removing the section breaks is not an option.

I have not only the issue of multiple PDF's when printing, but often the print job "loses" the correct page size after a section change, resulting in all the additional PDF having the wrong page size.

So, the problem is significant and also related to another complication as well.

I'm in MS Word 2011 for Mac.

PS: This is a disaster for any author who uses Word to compose their books.

PPS: This is a Microsoft problem I think, so I'm afraid that posting here will bring clarity, but not help. Sigh.

I was having the same issue (very frustrating) after previously doing it the same way with no problem. But, I found something that worked. When I opened the print screen, and clicked on pdf, instead of clicking save pdf I clicked on preview pdf. This opened the whole document and then I was able to export from Preview.

I hope that might help. 🙂

dbenoit's solution almost worked but my document contains some landscape graphs & even though all the pages are A4 it still messed them up.
When I clicked the Preview PDF it broke it up into different files again so no luck there either.

I finally found a solution that worked for me on Mac Forums.
I allowed it to be split into multiple PDF's, then opened the first PDF in Preview (not Adobe).
You can then drag & drop the other PDF files to the sidebar & add them to the end.

It"s all explained here.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-apps-games/258182-pdf-app.html

Thank you! This worked for me.

My Word file does have a section break, which matched others reports, but this was an old document, and I have saved it many times through the years to a pdf without having it break into two files. Most recent save was about 10 weeks ago. What changed in the meantime was an upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, and perhaps updates to Word.

After I followed dbenoit's advice to apply Page Setup settings to the Entire Document, I printed to a pdf and got an alert that said the footer in section one was outside the print area. I chose to Continue anyway and got one pdf document.

I suspect that footer change (have no idea where that came from) was what made the file break into pdfs when it hadn't previously. I subsequently went back into the document's Margins dialog and chose Whole Document from the "Apply to" popup. I had to click a "Fix" button before it would work, but that's fine.

aloha, this works but page break is not the same as section break...so this isn't a solution.The other solution isn't reliable because if you are talking of a doc. with more or less 100 pages (like my case) with a lot of section break, than combining all individual in one by the same order is a pretty **** big hard procedure and normally this isn't the philosophy of MAC/APPLE...so i think is time apple view this bug, to arrange a bether solution to us all...do you known any program that "turns around" this problem, like i done when i used microsoft with Primo PDF creator?

nice...answer to my problem...thanks

Thanks for the tip. Worked a treat.

Andrew

Thanks for the tip! I have been trying to solve the blank second page issue for months in some of my MS Word 2008 documents. 😀 This solution actually fixes the problem!

Thanks - fixed my problem - allows to print all sections as one PDF file without removing the section breaks (which I needed to keep for formatting reasons)

This tip was ESSENTIAL. I couldn't save a 1/6 letter page sized document, after being able to save it that size just earlier today. Once I chose Microsoft Word in the settings, it worked like a charm. Saved me MUCH headaches.

Hi all. I ran into the same problem eariler...I got multiple PDF files after I clicked "Save As PDF" since my file (in MS Word) got several section breaks (not page break). Now I managed to get a single continuous PDF file without having to remove section breaks. If you are still searching for a solution then you probably want to check this out: http://www.wikihow.com/Merge-PDF-Files.

Thank you so much for your tip. After tearing my hair out around this issue for months - why does it save as a single pdf on some occasions but not on others - you seem to have given me the real solution (that merging of two single pdf pages didn't work for me....). So, I'm really grateful that you took the time to post this fix up. And absolutely delighted that I finally found it!

This was extremely helpful. Thank you so much!!

Preview is an amazing app. Why don't I think of it all the time. Well, I will.