We're having a problem in my department where automatic page breaks in PDF output are landing in different places for different people who are working on the same project. This sometimes means that when someone compiles, they have to go through hundreds of pages of other people's work and take care of blank pages, pages with two lines of text, and pages where graphics got separated from the text describing them.
There are a few things we can rule out, but we still don't know what the problem is.
It's not the Flare version. We have the latest updates to Flare 12.
It's not something in the Flare project files. We still have this problem when we've verified that everything has been checked in to source control and everyone has the latest files.
It's not a missing or slightly different font. We have installed the same version of the same font from the same source.
It's not that we have different operating systems. We have the same version of Windows 7 and IT pushes updates, so those can't be out of sync.
A few things occur to me, none that likely, but since you have checked the likely stuff, here we go.
Is it just one person who has the problems, or could it be any writer?
If it could be any writer, then even if there is a valid reason (as yet unknown) why Flare is paginating differently for different people, I'm interested why, in some cases, Flare is breaking the pagination in a way that needs manual fixing. In my experience, if the styles have been set correctly to keep things together that need to stay together, PDFs usually paginate really well and don't need any manual adjustment. So what is happening to make it wrong, rather than just different? The only time I have had bad pagination is with single-sourced HTML/PDF that includes drop-down text in the HTML, as that can be a bit buggy and throw the PDF pagination off. That was intermittent as far as I remember.
Can you compare a good copy of the PDF with a broken one, and see where the first pagination difference occurs and why? Perhaps you will be able to see if it's caused by different font sizes, different line lengths, missing images, different conditional text being included, different values for variables, different hyphenation, or just Flare deciding to throw page breaks in different places.
Once it's gone wrong, other differences may follow, so if you can pinpoint the point where it goes wrong, you will know where to begin looking, at least on that person's machine.
Also, have you checked the build logs for each writer? Are any of them reporting unexpected errors? Can you compare them to see if there are differences in the content included?
What about versions of .NET? Have you all got the same version?
Marjorie
My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dogs already think I am.
And you should also check that everyone has their display set to 100%. That is, NOT the setting within Flare but in Windows. (Bit busy so just taking a Flare Forums break so can't go into detail, but I'm sure someone will jump in if you don't understand what I'm on about.)