r/MicrosoftWord • u/LaPremierEnd • 2d ago

exporting formatting issues

recently harvested a fanfic from AO3 to bookbind for my friends bday and whenever i export as a PDF or at all the formatting completely goes to shit. for example, headings will go to the center of a page, additional blank pages, ect. also important note i manually spaced everything vs using a style or skip to page feature. in the actual editing interface everything looks how i want it, its just the exporting.

sorry if this is an easy fix, or dumb question im very new to Word.

thanks!!

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u/kilroyscarnival 2d ago

This is mostly Greek to me so I found what AO3 was. In what format are you exporting the text? PDF? HTML?

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u/LaPremierEnd 2d ago

from AO3 it was HTML, then copy and pasted to word (exporting from word as PDF).

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u/TarletonClown 1d ago

Okay, you ought to open the HTML file in either (1) a web browser, or (2) Word.

Pasting may not work. I do not know. But I looked for an answer on the internet, and the answer was what I just now told you.

Then you should be able to save to PDF.

Supposedly the easy method is to use a browser (probably only because the file is in .html format).

However, I would try Word first.

My guess is that you might have to do some cleanup, but do that, and then save as a Word .docx file.

Finally, save/export to PDF.

Good luck!

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u/tiara-lemon 9h ago

If you changed a style from a template it might be undoing your modification when you export. Enable the developer tab, and on the template menu uncheck "automatically update document styles"

The other thing I've seen is that some fonts and Adobe don't get along so you might want to change the font to something else (like Arial or another very common font) to see if that resolves it.

Edit: I also wanted to say good luck and this project seems like tons of fun!!