Received a Word document from Philosophy containing some altered sections for a PDF document which is hosted on the Phil website. The complete document is in about ten sections, but the changes were to a subset of those sections, and only the changed sections were included in the Word document. I discovered this posting describing how I had previously (in December last year) gone through a difficult process to convert the original from Word to OpenOffice, discarding and removing a stack of nasty stuff such as invisible "chapters", section breaks and so on that had accumulated over the years (the document is eleven years old). However, somehow the last set of changes ended up being done in Word again, and the current version of the document, to which the changes had to be applied, was now a docx file. Misery indeed. After much struggling with Word 2007 on Windows, Greg and I ended up working through Word on the Mac to convert the document to an older-format Word file, which I then imported into OpenOffice, and there I was able to find and remove section breaks, chapter breaks, and other invisible fields and codes that were screwing up the pagination and so on. I then fixed a number of errors in the table of contents -- it has hard-coded page numbers -- and saved a doc file and a PDF.

I've sent the doc file of the full booklet back to the secretary with the request that she edit that file directly in future. She will then be able to save the PDF version herself, from Word (which now supports PDF export), and we'll no longer have to reconstitute the document every time from separate sections.

We should talk to the department about whether this document needs to exist in PDF format; virtually all of the information in it is already available in the calendar and on the website itself, so this long and arduous task might well be completely unnecessary.