Re: Re: Advice for formatting long document - Graphic use

From: SandJ (UseLinkToEmail_at_MacForumz.com)
Date: 11/10/04 

Date: 10 Nov 2004 14:25:17 -0500

"John McGhie1" wrote:
> Hi Sandi:
>
> On 10/11/04 7:12 AM, in article
> 419124a3$1_4@news.athenanews.com, "SandJ"
> <UseLinkToEmail@MacForumz.com> wrote:
>
> > However I‚d still like advice on placement/layout of these
> graphics,
> > if I want runnaround text. Perhaps I should stop trying to
> use this
> > programme as if it was QuarkXpress..... (which seems to be
> what is
> > asked of me).
>
> Yes, absolutely you should! That's terrible...
>
> Use it as if it were FrameMaker :-) You will get a much
> better run.
>
> Seriously, when people ask me "What's the best book to study
> to learn
> advanced Microsoft Word techniques?" I tell them that if they
> can lay their
> hands on a copy of the Adobe FrameMaker Handbook, that's the
> one to use.
>
> It's totally focused on producing long and/or complex
> documents, which is
> where doco pros make their living. And everything you read
> about in there
> has an equivalent in Word. Usually, a close equivalent.
> Often, if you
> simply close your eyes and pretend it *is* FrameMaker,
> everything will work
> perfectly.
>
> Much to my surprise, the Project Director on my current
> contract today
> signed off on a plan to implement fully automated production
> of my current
> tender document. This is a 2,500 page document, going to PDF,
> Print, CD-ROM
> and HTML. The team has some 40 authors and six editors. The
> Authors are
> untrained business specialists so you can imagine the mess
> that is coming
> in.
>
> I started out producing "some tools" to assist people with the
> more complex
> rescue operations necessitated by having untrained authors
> mangling
> production documents.
>
> The toolset grew and grew and grew. Tonight we did a trial
> run to press
> with 2,400 pages compiled from 450 subdocuments in Word.
> Total time to PDF
> is around 15 minutes, including generating 12 tables of
> contents.
>
> The level of automation we have achieved has far exceeded my
> wildest
> expectations. This is *why* I recommend Word as your weapon
> for production
> of large-scale documentation. Other products require far more
> time, and a
> large cast of highly-skilled professionals to do what Word
> can.
>
> I should mention that I am the only one on the project with
> "professional
> level" Microsoft Word skills. The Editor today could not
> figure out why
> some text would not print. It was behind a graphic... And
> she's the next
> most skilled Word user on the team :-)
>
> Don't give up, Sandra. There are plenty of people in here who
> can help you
> out: several of us do this kind of thing for a living. Keep
> asking. I
> personally will have more time to help you out next week
> (press day is the
> 16th...).
>
> Oh, yeah, that's right... You asked a question :-) I need to
> get my head
> around what kind of graphics you are using. The industry
> standard is JPEG
> for bitmaps, but I prefer PNG. Under most circumstances it is
> slightly
> smaller and much less lossy. For vector art, the industry
> standard is EPS,
> but I have moved away from that because there are too many
> issues getting it
> to work reliably cross-platform and in corporate settings. On
> the Mac you
> would use PICT, on Windows, EMF.
>
> I would still have a go in EPS first if I were trying to
> produce
> professional-quality paper output. If you can make EPS work,
> it's going to
> give the best result. However, EMF comes a very close second
> and happens
> with no problems on Windows. On the Mac, you need to use
> PICT, which is
> similar to WMF, compact but a little limited.
>
> If you are going out to the public Internet, there really are
> no vector
> formats sufficiently widely available to be safe, you have to
> use raster
> graphics. In which case, use PNG for line art and screen
> dumps, and JPEG
> for continuous-tone photographs and blends and things.
>
> Whatever you use, in Word set it inline with text. If you
> must flow text
> around it use a frame, not a text box. Frames are more
> limited in their
> positioning, but they will stay in the text layer and flow
> reliably with the
> text, which is what you normally want. Text in frames is
> visible to the TOC
> and Index generators, text in text boxes is not.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> --
>
> Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please
> do not email
> me unless I ask you to.
>
> John McGhie <john@mcghie.name>
> Consultant Technical Writer
> Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

Hi John,

Thanks once again - it’s very supportive to know that I’m not alone
here with what sometimes feels like the Aegean stables.

Regarding what kind of images I’m using.

I feel stupid saying this, but I don’t know what kind they are.

All the images I’m supposed to use are already imbedded in the Word
documents that were sent to me as content for the new single doc. I’ve
figured out how to do the "save as picture" function, which gives me
several options on how to save the graphic ( png, jpg etc) to my hard
drive, but I noticed that when I did this there seemed to be some loss
of quality, at least on screen.

I do not have access to the original files.

However, it seems that all I need to worry about (!) is creating a
nice looking PDF with pictures ( I don’t have Adobe Acrobat, I’ll be
"printing as PDF" in Word), and a final Word file without images,
just a note where they might be, and one or two essential ones.
Sending all the others I use along separately.

So my question now is... for the purposes of producing pdf, can I
simply copy and paste images across from Word doc to word doc? Since
I’m the one producing the PDF I guess I can place them how I like, in
text boxes, floating or whatever ( I don’t seem to have a frame
function in my word 2004?) - and then just remove them for the Word
file.

I’ve already discovered that forcing an automatic blank page or using
sections to force my chapters to start on the right hand side produces
nice, useless, blank pdf pages. So now I just have a very simple
document with page break before headings and a couple of sections for
’front matter’.

Since I’m not in contact with the final publishing resting place of
this word document, (madness, yes I know but that is how it is), I
have no idea how they would like the images, but this isn’t my issue
other than I’ll imagine I’ll have to save them off of their original
Word documents in some kind of format so I can send a long a zipped
folder.

This is probably more information than anyone needs but I guess I
needed to share...

All suggestions very gratefully recieved...

Sandra 

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