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Missing Page

Avatar Alan Cox
I receive the Minutes of a Committee I am foolish enough to sit on. They arrive as an attachment (Word) on my iMac and my iPadAir. The iMac ones have twice missed out a page (in the middle) and the iPad ones haven't. When I send the the latter from the iPad to the iMac, that page has again disappeared. Any explanations?

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Mick Burrell
What version of Word were they written in (are the files .doc or docx would be a start)? What version do you have on the iMac or are you opening using Pages?

If you can't solve this, could they be sent to you as a pdf - which is better practise anyway.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Alan Cox
The Secretary doesn't know which version of Word she uses and shrugs her shoulders when asked.

It is a docx. file. I don't have Word. On the iMac the Minutes open in Pages. On the iPadAir - I just double clicked the icon on her email and it opens intact. I have sent it from the iPad to the iMac as a Word and as a Pages file - and the missing page is missing in both cases, so it seems to be a feature of the iMac.

I agree that it would be better sent as a PDF and will be asking our new secretary (if we find one) to do this.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Mick Burrell
I think docx was introduced in Office 2007 for Windows and would be standard from then on. Pages normally copes pretty well - unless there's something very Word specific. Even if you don't have Pages on the iPad, my guess is it is using Pages technology to open the Word document.

Have you tried just sending the "missing" page from iPad to iMac to see what shows up? Are the contents sensitive or could you send the whole file from iPad and iMac to someone else (me?) who could see if the page is missing when it arrives?

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Alan Cox
The prolonged silence on this subject does not mean lack of interest or effort. We have tried to find an explanation but the 'dark side' is clinging on to its wayward secrets.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Tony Still
Alan, is it possible to have a copy of one of the documents that works on the iPad but not on the Mac? Assuming that they're not sensitive, that may help with finding the problem.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Mick Burrell
I think it's a tables issue in the latest Pages.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Tony Still
Mutter mutter, feeble new Pages, mutter mutter

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Tony Still
It turns out that the person who prepared Alan's document used a Word Table as a quick way to tabulate the document into three columns, so Mick was quite correct. In one of the columns, they put the bulk of the document with one row holding about three pages' worth of content. Personally, I believe this is a (common) misuse of Tables but it works OK in Word.

Unfortunately, Pages (on Mac) seems to have an inbuilt assumption that a single Table row will not be deeper than a single page. This manifests itself as the content of an overly deep row being truncated at the bottom of the page (as paginated by Pages). The content is not lost, simply invisible off the bottom of the page. If you delete part of the visible text (or reduce its font size), some of the 'lost' text starts to appear.

In principle you could create more rows in the document and cut and paste from the overly long row until the text has been split into several rows, none of which is more than a page deep. In Alan's case, a quick and dirty approach was adequate: TextEdit will open the file without any pagination. It messes up the column widths but these are easily dragged to approximate positions and the document is then readable. It can also be saved as PDF though the pagination will likely differ from the original.

Re: Missing Page

Avatar Alan Cox
Brilliant!
 
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