Printing problem

HI,
I’m trying to learn DT (Pro). I imported all my recipes as a test but haven’t yet deleted them elsewhere. Today I printed out one, and even after I checked the right printer and A4 paper, portrait layout, were set, the recipe printed out badly - it was cut off in the middle, as if it had been intended for paper twice as wide. As I say, the default was portrait format. The file was a Microsoft Word DOC.
Could someone tell me what I’m doing wrong? This recipe was originally from a web page, but I can’t see that that makes a difference.

MTIA
Zeppa

Don’t print MS Word documents in DTP. Open in MS Word and print there.

DTP shows Quicklook previews of MS Word documents, and when you print from DTP you’re just printing the Quicklook preview – which is pretty ugly (as you found). This is because Microsoft makes poor quality Quicklook plugins for its products, and has nothing to do with DTP.

The only documents I print from DTP are PDFs, RTFs, and text. Anything else is best printed from the app where the document was created, because that’s the only app that was designed to properly control the output of its doc types.

Thanks very much. So if I have saved a Word file in DT, I will still be able to open it in Word? I use Windows for work and a lot of the files I would want to save are Word files, but I could save them as PDFs. Or if I saved them as TXT files, would that be any better? I presume not.

Zeppa

Absolutely. Word documents stored in DT can always be opened by Word. DT is a repository. The files in the repository are always available to open in any application that can work with that file format.

To open, use Data > Open With, or use the Open With action in the contextual menu, or add the Open Externally action to the tool bar. Any application associated with a file type in the Get Info panel of Finder will appear in the Open With menus, and the primary associated application will be the automatic choice for the Open Externally action.

It’s your choice. Generally, there’s no reason to convert a file from one format to another just to store that document in DT.

Thanks again for the explanation. Actually, I printed out in an old version of Pages - Pages is very good with Word files (haven’t got Neo Office loaded at the moment).

Zeppa