BIG Word file to PDF - with bookmarks?

[Jackie DiGiovanni]

 "Rebecca Hopkins"  wrote
> I have this enormous Word file which will not PDF in one go - I have to 
> break it up into three pieces.

It is possible that your machine is lot big enough to convert your file. It 
happens.

I don't know if we are apples to apples here. I work on an 800+ page Word 
doc, about 45 MB, hundreds of bookmarks, odd/even pages, lots of sections, 
different page sizes and orientations, lots of graphics, lots of tables, 
cross-references, hyperlinks, index, four-level deep TOC. My machine is XP, 
Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz. I'm using Word 2003 and Acrobat 7. My file converts OK. 
I admit the file is a little burby and sometimes drools. This file began in 
Word 95 and has been updated many times over the years. In the beginning, it 
would fail to convert because of a filename that didn't follow DOS 8.3 
naming conventions, margins too small, graphics in the margins, perhaps 
confusion about whether or not to start a new page, a table that really 
wanted to be set to "do not allow to break across a page", a table that 
somehow got corrupted, graphics that somehow got corrupted, myriad other 
things. I could look in the log and see what page the conversion died on and 
then look on that page in the file and try to figure out what was the issue. 
Eventually I learned what to always and never do, like to always use the 
custom numbering style and to never use the numbering button on the toolbar.

I had to "adjust" the parameters under Change Conversion Settings. In other 
words, I set up different joboptions than what comes as defaults with 
Acrobat. It was trial and error to get the settings correct. I have found 
that what the engineers used to create the CAD drawings affects what 
parameters I need to use--not that they tell me when they're doing something 
different. Sometimes other people provide me with graphics from a variety of 
software sources. It comes to me as TIF, but I don't know what it started 
as. Sometimes, I need to adjust the parameters to accommodate that. When I 
get it working, you just know I take lots of screen prints and document 
exactly what I did that worked and what I tried that didn't work.

I make sure I'm pointing to the correct "joboptions" file; it's the last one 
I changed or opened under Adobe PDF/Change Conversions Settings. I use Adobe 
PDF/ Convert to Adobe PDF, put in a file name, browse to the location I 
want, and enter.

I still have moments of "Hmmmmmmm". More often than not, I use the Control 
Panel to reinstall/repair Acrobat, reboot, try again, and get success.

This article from Adobe has some ideas that may help you. 
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=316508


Jackie DiGiovanni
JD Technical Communications