7.5 Printing, PDF and sharing

What you'll be able to do

Send documents that look, on the reader's screen and printer, exactly as they looked on yours. You will preview them, export the right kind of PDF, and slim the file before mailing it.

Before you start

Use your repaired formatting practice document. It is about to be sent to someone.

The work

1. Same either way: preview before anything prints. Press Ctrl+P and the Print screen shows the true page image, with page controls under it. Read it as a proofing pass. Look for a heading stranded alone at the foot of a page, a table split badly, or a last page holding two lines. Fix the causes in the document, with a Ctrl+Enter page break or the paragraph's Keep with Next setting, rather than the symptoms at the printer.
2. Same either way: the two-lines-over problem has a civilised tool. On the same Print screen, the scaling dropdown offers 1 Page Per Sheet → variants including shrinking output a size. For a page that must fit, such as a form or a notice, printing slightly smaller beats operating on the text. Squeezing a fifty-page report this way is an admission that the document needs work, so go and fix it.
3. Same either way: understand why documents change on other machines, so that the fixes make sense. The .docx you send is instructions plus the names of fonts. The reader's Word draws it again using their fonts and their printer's measurements. A missing font is swapped for another, and every line break shifts. The cures, best first. Send a PDF when the document is finished, as in step 4. Embed the fonts when the reader must edit it with your exact fonts, using File → Options → Save → Embed fonts in the file, which costs file size. Or use fonts that every Windows machine carries.
4. Same either way: export finished documents as PDF. Press F12 for Save As and choose PDF as the type, or use File → Export → Create PDF/XPS. A PDF carries its own drawing of the page. What you saw is what everyone gets, on every device, and it cannot be edited by accident. That is the Getting Your Footing rule with the mechanics attached. A link or a .docx for work still moving, and a PDF for work that is done.
5. Same either way: know about PDF/A for when archives ask for it. In the PDF save dialog, use Options → PDF/A compliance. PDF/A puts everything inside the file and allows nothing outside it, which is the archive-grade kind that institutions, courts and journals request. The file is larger, and it is guaranteed to open the same way in twenty years. Use it when the requirement names it.
6. Same either way: slim the file before mailing. Compress the pictures with Picture Format → Compress Pictures, which is usually 90 per cent of the weight. Embed fonts only when you truly need to. Check the PDF export's own Minimum Size option when the file is only going to be read on screen. A 40 MB attachment is nearly always uncompressed photographs with a document's name on them.

Try it

Preview your document with Ctrl+P and fix one bad break at its cause. Export a normal PDF and a PDF/A, and compare their sizes. Compress its images and export again. Then open the .docx on another machine, or in Word online, and note any font that was swapped. Then open the PDF, which is identical everywhere.

Check yourself