Word 2008 "Draft View" font drawing issues

E

East_Side_Rob

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel When I work in "draft view," which is most of the time, and I'm scrolling, the program often doesn't properly redraw the text. As a result, the ends of lines of text disappear or sometimes I see double images of text. I can redraw the text either by doing a "select all" or by flipping to "print layout view," both of which are complete time-wasters.

I didn't have this problem in Word 2004 when I was in "normal view," as "draft view" was called at the time.

So, what gives?
 
J

John McGhie

The short answer is "because that's the way it works."

The much longer answer is: "Draft View is a power-saving view designed to
provide speed and responsiveness when working on larger documents. Larger
in this case meaning from about 20 pages up to 5,000 pages.

I work in draft view a lot, because most of my documents are in the
1,000-page range. And because Draft View provides a much better look at the
control characters so it is much easier to see what is going on.

The biggest source of power saving is disabling the pagination engine. The
pagination engine is responsible for recomputing the position of all he
black bits every time anything changes in the document. So every character
you type, Word recomputes the entire layout of the document and re-draws the
screen.

That really keeps the CPU cooking and eats laptop batteries for breakfast.
Modern computers are so powerful that often we don't notice, but the power
demands of all that activity can become truly outrageous.

Because the pagination engine is disabled, any change to the text that would
require a change to the page lay-up will look a bit weird, and often will
produce display "artefacts" such as you describe.

And you have discovered the most effective solution available: flip into
page layout view. The pagination engine will spring to life and re-draw the
screen for you. Alternatively, if you page back two or three screenfuls,
you will force a re-draw, which has the same effect.

Cheers

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel When
I work in "draft view," which is most of the time, and I'm scrolling, the
program often doesn't properly redraw the text. As a result, the ends of lines
of text disappear or sometimes I see double images of text. I can redraw the
text either by doing a "select all" or by flipping to "print layout view,"
both of which are complete time-wasters.

I didn't have this problem in Word 2004 when I was in "normal view," as "draft
view" was called at the time.

So, what gives?

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
 

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