Tables, borders, and photos that don’t perfectly fit

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Hi all,

I have a one-page document that’s essentially all table. The table is three rows that fill the page vertically and horizontally. The top row is one cell, the middle row is one cell. The bottom row is three cells, narrow, wide, narrow.

There’s a 3 pt border on all cell borders except for one line between the top cell and the middle cell. The cells are set so a photo added to the top cell will auto-shrink. A macro sizes up a photo that’s too small, without distorting the ratio (a wider photo will fill the cell from left to right and leave white space at the top and bottom, a taller photo will fill from top to bottom of the cell with white space on the sides). So the photo resizes, but seems to be offset by a tiny amount on the top and left, leaving a tiny (1 pixel) band of white space. This may be a Word display oddity. On the left and bottom, the photo underlaps the border by a tiny amount. This, too may be a Word display oddity.

The problem with all this is that the document gets turned into a pdf (Adobe), and the tiny space doesn’t exist for adobe. In fact, the photo prints on top of the border on the left by a pixel or so, but does turn a thin line of pixels white.

36286-table-photo-overlap

On the right, the pdf creates a slight jog in the border line. Not what I expected and kinda yucky looking…

36287-table-photo-overlap-R

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to get a polished result here? (I’ve already thought of “Get rid of Adobe” and am afraid it’s not a viable solution at this point. :rolleyes:)

Thanks much, in advance! Kim

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How is the PDF being generated? If I create a document containing a table that fits tightly around a picture, then save as a PDF, I don’t see any of the artifacts you mention.

FWIW, it’s also possible those artifacts are a combination of: (a) the result of Word’s image compression algorithm; and (b) the image size being slightly larger than the indicated dimensions (they get rounded off for display purposes).

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Thanks macropod,

I used Print and chose Adobe PDF as the printer. Since your post I used Save and Send, using both Adobe’s and Word’s PDF. They both eliminated the tiny white line, but not the ever so slight overlap. Still, it looks better. I’ll investigate what my client is using as both a PDF program and the method they use with it.

Thanks for the insights on the artifacts, too. Very useful.

Best, Kim

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I dropped trying to interface graphics and text with Word a long time ago. I love the tables, and it does great stuff, but not with graphics. Try a free program called Scribus. It’s like a user friendly version of Photoshop and once you get the hang of it you will have great output and it converts beautifully to pdf files to send to a printing firm.

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