A friend has a large Word (365) document with 350 pictures (in a table, 4 per page) that he wants to create a PDF for printing via FedEx (the prefer PDF). The entire document is 640 MB, 350 pictures with 4 per page. When he tries to save as a PDF the resulting file has about 15% of the pictures show up as black. And using the Print to PDF route it stalls and eventually a message comes up saying Word is not responding and he has to do a forced quit, or it results in a PDF with the same issue. I have suggested breaking into parts since he wants to bind this document into a book (it is a biography), but the images alone in a table would be a very large file. I think he just got a Macbook Air with M3 processor, we were discussing but I don’t know if he pulled the trigger in September. Is there any software that could handle a document this size? Or what is a better approach? He has gone to bed for the night but I thought I would ask here. Thanks in advance.
Print it in sections then merge all the separate pdfs into one using Preview.
Another idea: try opening the document in Pages.app. If the formatting isn’t too mangled, see if that app can do a better job of converting to PDF.
Instead of “print to PDF” try “open PDF in Preview.”
I found weird problems Saturday when I tried to selectively print from a 50 page mail merge document in Word 365. As a “letter” a section break is added between each instance of the merge.
Problems with specialist documents like mail merges, and for that matter your friend’s large document that would be better off in a page layout application, have been part of The Word Experience for generations.
Try making a copy of the file and use Word’s Reduce File Size function (in the File menu) to see if that results in a smaller file that can be exported as a PDF. This function tries to optimise the size of images in the document.
But I agree that dividing the document into more manageable sections is worth trying. Preview can be used to easily to recombine the resulting PDF files.
One caution here: be sure to make a backup copy of the file before attempting to reduce the file size. Then, since the file has many images, review the images to ensure they are at a resolution that still yields good enough printed results.
I would echo many of the above. His images are probably overkill for the intended output. Four images on a letter sized page, even at 300dpi, that’s probably only requires each image’s width to be 1000 pixels or so. Batch processing them using a tool like Retrobatch in advance would have made his life easier and his laptop nimbler.
I’ve found Pages more reliable at exporting large docs to pdf and at handling documents which probably should have been made in a page layout program. Pages also has a reduce file size option which trims excess and optimizes images, but I’ve mainly used PDF Expert for reducing file sizes. Acrobat offers the most control on that and is definitely recommended for tricky large PDFs however. I would try importing into Pages, double check formatting and placement, export from there and see if the images appeared as wished. If it failed then break it up as folks suggested, it’s easy to merge them in Preview.