Word, Acrobat and VBA – Oh My!

At work, I have a lot of Microsoft Word documents (close to a hundred) that I need to convert into Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Printing them one at a time to Acrobat Distiller was just too mind-numbingly tedious for words. Being the geeky sort, I decided to write a VBA subroutine to distill all of the Word files that were in a single directory with a single button press.

I wrote the code and it seemed to work just fine and dandy. It certainly was very quick. Then a coworker took a look at the PDF documents and discovered that Acrobat Distiller had screwed up the pagination. The strange thing was, Distiller worked just fine from within Microsoft Word. It was only when the VBA subroutine was printing the documents that things were getting screwed up. Obviously there was something wrong with my code. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. So back to drawing board I went.

After another half-hour or so, I came to a remarkable discovery. In my initial design, I had decided to set the active printer to Acrobat Distiller from inside the subroutine. This was in order to prevent accidentally printing several hundred pages of documents to a real printer, which had happened in the past. I recorded a macro while manually changing the printer to Acrobat Distiller and took a look at the code the Macro Recorder produced. There was only one line of code, which I took and placed in my subroutine prior to printing:

   ActivePrinter = “Acrobat Distiller”

Turns out that this was the reason the pagination was being screwed up. If I commented out this line and set the active printer via the UI, everything worked just fine.

My remarkable discovery:
The same action when done in VBA can work differently than when done via the user interface, even when using code produced by Word’s Macro Recorder.

And how was your day? 🙂

Update: July 9, 2004 at 5:26 PM
Apparently, it wasn’t setting ActivePrinter in VBA – I am still getting the error whenever I print using code. 🙁

Update: July 12, 2004 at 2:57 PM
Also, it happens when I print to Distiller from Explorer.

Update: July 19, 2004 at 8:15 PM
Adding a single space before the carriage return at the offending sections seems to correct the problem.

Tonight’s IRC Chat Transcript

A pretty good chat tonight – we had five people show up: Matt Harris (myself), Death Is Your Art, Lorne’s Lady, Elais and Amy Madison. The transcript is here.

Slightly Skewed Recaps

It came to my attention during a chat Saturday night that there were some people who had never heard of the Slightly Skewed Recaps of the Harry Potter films. Such a terrible tragedy demands that I immediately link to said recaps:

Slightly Skewed Recap of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Slightly Skewed Recap of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The recaps are simply still screen captures from the films, with an alternate version of the dialogue posted from the viewpoint of a Harry/Hermione shipper. To be blunt, they are hilarious. Even non-Harry/Hermione shippers will love them.

The rest of the site is pretty good, too, with lots of screen caps of the actors from the films and some interesting essays.

Chat Transcript Posted

I have posted the Succubus Club IRC Chat Transcript from Wednesday, June 30.

French Wine

A rather short post by the Captain of the USS Clueless on the drop in French wine sales to the U.S.

My opinion…sales of French Wine are down in the U.S. due to the competition from the massive amounts of Whine which is the French are simply giving away.

Tonight’s Succubus Club Chat

I have posted the transcript for tonight’s Succubus Club IRC Chat.

Runaway Trains At 3 A.M. & Lines Of Communication

Fic Title: Runaway Trains At 3 A.M.
Author: C. L. Kamnikar
Links: Runaway Trains At 3 A.M. on Chaos Horizons, Runaway Trains At 3 A.M. on Fanfiction.net
Content: PG
Status: Complete
Rating: E-Excellent

Fic Title: Lines of Communication
Author: C. L. Kamnikar
Links: Lines of Communication on Chaos Horizons, Lines of Communication on Fanfiction.net
Content: PG
Status: Complete
Rating: E-Excellent

I haven’t found any really good Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and Smallville crossovers (I have found quite a few bad ones) except for Runaway Trains At 3 A.M. and its sequel, Lines of Communication. These two fics are wonderful. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the first story starts with Dawn Summers and Clark Kent meeting ny chance in a bus station in Denver.

Both stories are very well written. The interaction between Dawn and Clark seems incredibly natural and their with the other characters in the stories is also totally in character. We don’t see much of the supernatural/out-of the ordinary in the stories, but what there is just seems totally logical – C.L. Kamnikar blends both the Buffeyverse and Smallville universe together really well.

Two excellent fics – I just wish C. L. Kamnikar would write a third in the series.

Contrite Spirits

Fic Title: Contrite Spirits
Author: Lizbeth Marcs
Links: Contrite Spirits On Fanfiction.Net
Content: PG
Status: Completed
Rating: G-Good

Contrite Spirits is set post-season 7 BTVS. Faith and Xander have a religious discussion at a cathedral in Canada. While not incredibly long, at a little over 10,000 words, Contrite Spirits has some heft to it. I found the story quite enjoyable. It is well written, grammatically speaking. The characterizations of Faith and Xander seem spot-on. I definitely like the backstory on Faith…it seems to fit smoothly into what we already know about her.

Jury Duty

I was on jury duty yesterday, in the LA Criminal Court System. It was the first time I had been called since 2001, and there were a few differences. The courthouse where I served has moved to the “1 day/1 jury” system, so if you don’t get put on a jury the first day, your service is over. That was a vast improvement over the last time I was there. In 2001, you kept coming back for 10 days if you didn’t get on a jury or if the jury was dismissed prior to deliberating.

I didn’t serve on a jury, but I noticed a couple of interesting things about the process:

• Pay is higher than it used to be – $15/day plus $.38 per mile for transportation expenses. While this is higher than the $5 day of the 1990s, it is still really cheap, especially compared to federal court, which pays $40/day plus mileage. Assuming an 8 hour day, jury service pays a little more than 50¢ per hour. This is about the rate one gets in prison.
  I heard a lot of people in the jury assembly room grumbling about that, as their employers don’t pay for jury service.
• Not having an employer pay for jury service or being self-employed is no longer considered an excuse. This can make jury duty very expensive. My employer doesn’t pay for jury service and I estimate that yesterday cost me about $100. The jury assembly officer said that the average duration of jury service when on a jury was 5-7 days. If I had been selected, I could easily have been out upwards of $500, and might not have been able to pay all of my bills this month.
• As part of the “1 day/1 jury” system, the court doesn’t pay for the first day. This allows them to call a lot more jurors than are actually needed. Yesterday, there were approximately 300 people serving, but only 3 juries were empanelled all day. At 12 people per jury, this means that 90% of the people called for service yesterday weren’t placed on a jury. About half the jurors (myself among them) weren’t even called once, which means we just sat around in the jury assembly room all day.
• The court building seemed somewhat run down. The bathrooms had locks broken off and some of the toilet seats were etched. There wasn’t a great deal of graffiti, though.
• One jury that was empanelled was dismissed, as the defendant escaped. The people on that jury were sent back to the assembly room to see if they would be needed for a different panel, said fact about which I heard several of them complaining.

I definitely have mixed feelings about the system. While I feel it is definitely less of a time burden than before, I definitely think it should pay a fair amount more than it does, at least minimum wage.

I know that due to challenges for cause and preemptory challenges it is impossible to estimate precisely what the need for jurors will be, but they can do better than they did yesterday. The system is very inefficient and more effort needs to be put in to accurately gauging the real need for jurors and calling up the correct amount.

Baen Free Library

One of the things I have been meaning to post is a link to Baen Books’ Free Library. Baen books has made available, for free download or reading online, over 50 of the books that they publish. The books are downloadable from the author’s page in the following formats:

• HTML (zipped)
• MS Reader
• Mobipocket Reader for Palm/Pocket PC
• Rocket E-Book
• Rich Text Format

None of the books are copy protected. Like the free CDs Baen includes with some of their books, they are freely distributable (although you may not charge money for them).

I got hooked on David Drake & Eric Flint’s Belisarius series from the free copies of the first three books and have purchased the last two from Baen Webscriptions. The Belisarius books are downloadable from Eric Flint’s Baen Webpage or David Drake’s Baen Webpage. Direct links are here if you wish to read them online:

1. An Oblique Approach
2. In The Heart Of Darkness
3. Destiny’s Shield

Another series by Eric Flint worth reading is the 1632 series. The first two books are available on Eric’s Baen Webpage. Direct links are here if you wish to read them online:

1. 1632
2. 1633

The last author I want to plug with books in Baen’s Free Library is David Weber. All of his books are good, but his Honor Harrington books, starting with On Basilisk Station are especially so.