Creating PDFs from Microsoft Word files on Microsoft platforms can be a problem when the document contains Macrons and other characters not in all the standard character sets.

The following technique appears to work at least in some cases where you have a postscript printer visible and Adobe PDF writer installed.

1. Open the document in Word
2. Go to file->print
3. In Print dialog, select a PostScript printer and check the "Print to file" checkbox
4. When you hit "OK" it should ask you for a filename to save the .prn with
5. Open Notepad and from within Notepad open the .prn. Don't open the .prn by double clicking.
6. The first line of the .prn should be quite long and contain lots of junk. Delete everything up to the "%!PS-Adobe-3.0". These must be the first characters in the file.
7. Go to file->save as and save the file as a .ps file
8. Double clicking on the .ps file should launch Adobe PDF writer to automatically create a .pdf from the .ps
9. The pdf file will almost certainly look dreadful, this is because all the font that make things look nice on the screen got thrown away in the "Print to file" step, but should print nicely.

For those without the budget for the full Acrobat, ghostscript contains a ps2pdf(1) program that works nicely. Debian packages it inside gs-common

If someone has a word / publisher / whatever document that they want to "Put On The InterWeb?" then you can use the "MS Imagesetter Printer" that is created by the "Commercial Printer" option when installing Publisher. This creates a pair of pseudo-printers on a windows box, which can be used to Print to File if the app doesn't support such. The printers are called "MS Publisher Colour Printer" and "MS Publisher Imagesetter" Both are capable of colour, and I've had the most luck using Imagesetter.