Word Perfect Help

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Everone:

We're a little old fashioned here at Two Plus Two, and I still wotk in Word Perfect when it comes to our book manuscripts. Recently I have a problem I have never seen before.

When I receive a manuscript from an author, it almost always comes in Microsoft Word. So I copy it into Word Perfect 11 and then begin the process of editing, formatting, spacing, etc.

But what is happening which is causing some concern is the file will look perfect on the screen (in Word Perfect), but when I print it out little spacing problems appear, and they seem to appear at random. Occasionally, an extra space will pop into a word, so it will look like this: wor d

or more often a space will be missing between two words so they will look like this: twowords

but again the file looks just fine on the screen.

What's also unusual is that if I convert the Word Perfect file to a PDF, it appears to come out perfect (on the screen and when I print it). That is no extra spaces and no deleted spaces. Also, as far as I can tell, there are no hidden codes embedded in the Word Perfect file.

So does anyone have any experience with this? and if you do, is there a way I can correct it?

Thanks and best wishes,

Mason

[Josem]

1) stop using word perfect and get with the rest of the world (ie, use the same software as your stakeholders)

2) it sounds likely that the problem is not in word perfect, but rather, in the connection between word perfect and your printer drivers.

i sometimes have a very similar problem with small text on non-standard paper sizes in ms word. i've found that the easiest way of solving the problem was to print to pdf, and then print the pdf file.

[kerowo]

You might try opening the Word file in Word and doing a save as to either an earlier version of Word that is known good with WP or to WP itself if that still exists in Word. You can test this out by downloading a trial version of Word from MS.

[SamIAm]

[ QUOTE ]
1) stop using word perfect and get with the rest of the world (ie, use the same software as your stakeholders)

[/ QUOTE ]
WordPerfect is awesome and Mason's fine using what he's using. Whoever's holding Mason's stake, they need to get with the big W.P.

Note: I started using WordPerfect at WP6.0.


A few questions:<ul type="square">[*]When you do a Print Preview, do you see the random spaces?[*]If you copy the offending text from the imported document to a new WP document, is it still glitchy?[*]If you use the "show code" command, where it displays every tag like "open italics" and "close bold", almost like forum code (an option that Microsoft Word doesn't have), do you see anything weird in those phantom spaces?[/list]
edit:[ QUOTE ]
Also, as far as I can tell, there are no hidden codes embedded in the Word Perfect file.

[/ QUOTE ]Sorry, didn't catch this part. I guess this was already using the ShowCode view?

[Mason Malmuth]

Hi Sam:

I actually started with WP5.1.

[ QUOTE ]
When you do a Print Preview, do you see the random spaces?

[/ QUOTE ]

No. It looks perfect.

[ QUOTE ]
If you copy the offending text from the imported document to a new WP document, is it still glitchy?


[/ QUOTE ]

Well I did this. In fact, I thought I had already done this several times, bu I guess I didn't do it exactly as you suggest. To be specific, I copied my complete file starting with the very first code on the very first page and in the copied file all the problems seem to be fixed.

But there is also more. The copied file went from 305 pages to 315 pages. In addition, taking a quick look through it, I noticed that some of the tables where I had sized the columns to fit exactly, some of the columns were no longer wide enogh.

I suspect that somehow the point size of the letters got a little bigger even though both files show the point size at 11.5 (which is the size we use for our books, and the font is Times New Roman).

Anyway, if I have more problems I'll post again. But in the meantime thank you very much .

Best wishes,
Mason

[cha59]

I use Word and Word Perfect every day.

This error you describe happens often when you get fonts other than Times New Roman in the document. I see this all the time and it is always font related.

Word Perfect has lots of attributes but there are lots of little quirks like the one you describe.

[nuclear500]

WORDPAD.EXE

So long as there is no fancy formatting in the .doc, wordpad works fine to edit a Word document.