Here’s a report of several issues found while doing an export from Word to PDF of 2 documents. You’ll find attached a zip file containing 4 documents
doc1.doc and doc1.pdf
doc2.doc and doc2.pdf
The places where the issues were detected are highlighted in red containing a Case Number. Here’s a quick description of each case:
Case I (doc1):
A word text box originally placed without borders is shown with a single border line after the document is converted to PDF.
Case II (doc1):
A single line is converted into 2 lines after the conversion to PDF.
Case III (doc1):
A bold underlined text, when converted to PDF shows a bold text, but the underlying line is very thin (better noticed after printing the PDF and compared to the printed document)
Case IV (doc1):
A double line is converted into single line after the conversion to PDF. This one is really really important to our clients since they use this format a lot in their financial statements like Income Statement, Balance Sheet, etc.
Case V and VI (doc2):
The star symbol (*) footnote reference disappears after the conversion to PDF.
Case VII (doc2):
A line at the bottom of the document disappears after the document is converted to PDF.
We will kindly appreciate if you can give us a realistic estimate of what issues you can fix and how long would it take for you to do so. Except for case VII, all the other items were reported to us as critical for our clients to generate their Investors correspondence.
Thanks for the report. While I’m sure most of the issues were reported before, we will check all of the points.
Please understand that Aspose.Word + Aspose.Pdf does not give you EXACT Word to PDF conversion always. Some Word document features we simply cannot convert to PDF yet. Other differences in the output are because Aspose.Pdf does not exactly lay out document into pages like MS Word does.
While we are constantly trying to improve the conversion fidelity, I recommend you prepare to decide which of the issues you reported you can live with.
Case II: A single line is converted into 2 lines after the conversion to PDF.
You have two paragraphs one after another and both paragraphs have a single bottom border. MS Word treats them as “conforming” paragraphs and eliminates borders between them. Aspose.Word and Aspose.Pdf do not implement this algorithm for eliminating borders yet, therefore you get two borders. This is a known issue and is in our task list. Sorry, its not been scheduled for fixing yet. Rought estimate 2-3 months. To workaround remove bottom border of the top paragraph in MS Word.
Case III: A bold underlined text, when converted to PDF shows a bold text, but the underlying line is very thin (better noticed after printing the PDF and compared to the printed document)
Aspose.Pdf makes the underline slightly thinner than it is in MS Word. I will bring this issue to the attention of the Aspose.Pdf team.
Please also note that MS Word allows various types of underlines, such as wavy, dashed, double etc, but all these underline types are converted into a single solid underline when using Aspose.Word + Aspose.Pdf.
Case IV: A double line is converted into single line after the conversion to PDF.
This happens because in MS Word the line style is a double line, but Aspose.Pdf does not support double, wavy etc lines. I will bring this issue to the attention of the Aspose.Pdf team.
Case VII: A line at the bottom of the document disappears after the document is converted to PDF.
The line at the bottom of your document is a line that separates footnotes or endnotes from the rest of the document. Since footnotes and endnotes are not export to PDF, their separator line is not exported either.
Case I: A word text box originally placed without borders is shown with a single border line after the document is converted to PDF.
This is a known issue. All textboxes (in fact all shapes with text) are exported as textboxes with a single solid border to PDF at the moment. I will try to implement support for borders/no borders for textboxes in the next 2 weeks.
We will support footnote and endnote and improve underline support in Aspose.Pdf. But we can’t finish this work in short time. I hope these feature can be available 3 months later.
We have released a new version of Aspose.Words that supports footnote/endnote export to PDF, although StartNumber and Position parameters are still not supported.