How complicated can it be?

Just how complicated can it be to make a simple e-book into a PDF from a Word document?

Well, the answer is incredibly complicated if you create a 'masterpiece' (my own interpretation, LOL)! I got all my nineteen articles. I created my text styles and then, in a stroke of creative inspiration, I decided to put different works of art as the watermark background to each and every page. So for the piece on painting wildlife, I put an image of an owl. For the articles on choosing and caring for artists brushes, I used images of - yep, you guessed it - artists brushes, and for some of the more philosophical articles, I used works of art from famous artists such as Degas and Renoir that I found in the public domain.

Where I couldn't find what I wanted, I improvised. One article is about painting with acrylics. As I couldn't find a public domain photograph of a selection of acrylic paint tubes, I decided the next best thing was a painting done in acrylic. Not finding any of these in the public domain either, I scanned part of a piece of one of my own works.

It took all day to complete the aesthetic work on this e-book. Then I saved it to PDF and......

disaster!

The images ended up in front of the text, not behind. So I downloaded a variety of PDF creators. The results ranged from the same to worse! One decided the images weren't even watermarks, so they all ended up in their original bright colour. And of course, the text remained behind.

What else to try? Well, what about Publisher? It loaded the Word document, but all the images are sitting outside of the pages, all in glorious full colour and in varying sizes. Hmm. Maybe, with another day's work. (Insert loud groan here).

Next brilliant idea. Try Open Office on a friends computer. Well, it opened the Word document. So far, so good, but some of the images are so pale they are invisible (or they are missing). And a little problem. The text is all frozen and can't be selected or changed. However, the cursor can be positioned and the keyboard shortcuts work, so all I have to do is 'change' all the fonts to what they already are then it works. But the big test, what happens when you try to make it a PDF? IT WORKS!

All I have to do now is download Open Office, unfreeze all the text and reposition all the background images, save the document as a PDF and upload it to my website.

It had better get some downloads after all this effort!