Re: problems pasting Adobe Illustrator graphics into Word

Hi Henry:

As far as I know, Word will handle PICT, TIFF and WMF as EPS Previews.

You can't do WMF on the Mac, of course.

Word "won't" handle any kind of illustration that contains anything above
RGB (32-bit) colour. You can get away with it in EPS because Word never
tries to display the EPS, it simply passes it through.

But any form of CMYK illustration (48-bit) will not work. And as the other
poster mentioned, if using TIFF for the placable header of an EPS, keep it
down to 8-bit. Black and white is safer...

PC Word will handle EPS without any kind of header (show Image placeholders
so you can see where the damn things are...) but I am not sure that Mac Word
will...

I've had no problems (apart from document bloat) in taking Word up to 4800
dpi using raster graphics, PROVIDED they do not contain more than RGB
colour.

Of course one should be aware that an A4 image at 4800 dpi does result in a
chunky little 500 MB TIFF. I've never tried printing one off the iBook, I
need the result this week. The previous PC had only 256 MB of memory, so it
wouldn't touch them. This one has 4GB and it will do it. Usually today...

Cheers

On 20/3/06 5:21 AM, in article C042E126.175C6%henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"henryn" <henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Elliott:

Thanks for your post on this thread:

in article 190320061338506783%nospam@xxxxxxxxx, Elliott Roper at
nospam@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 3/19/06 5:38 AM:

In article <C0418CB4.17436%henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, henryn
<henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Elliott:

Thanks for your post on this thread:
<snip>
You have my sympathy. I spent over an hour this morning trying to get
an eps with a Preview that Word would accept.

Did you discover any trick? I usually end up with some superstitious
workflow that involves sacrificial animals, patting parts of my body or the
tree outside, and mumbling arcane formulae.

My technique exactly. The phase of the moon is possibly relevant too.

I would like to find out how to make this process more predictable and
less... mystical.


Please say more about "eps with preview". Do you mean the distinction
between what you see in the Word document window and what is printed? I
guess the Word screen shows the preview, right, and the eps goes straight
through to the printer. Or...?

Yes, Word always shows the preview on screen, and sometimes prints it.
The eps goes to the the printer if it is a postscript printer. If you
print direct to PDF Word also sends the preview.

Aha! First step: You're working mostly with files generally containing
both preview and full eps. I'm working mostly with the clipboard
containing... well, lots of alternatives.

"Sometimes"? It would be nice to have more control over this.

(workaround: print to
PDF as postscript, and make the PDF from the .ps in preview.app)

Thanks for that tip! I had now idea that preview.app has that capacity.
I've got an old copy of Acrobat, but it is inconvenient to operate in
Classic.

<snip>
My take on this is Word is trying to be helpful. Unfortunately, it doesn't
always succeed. Unfortunately, we don't know enough about its method to
feed it the right material.

It is very strange to me that sometimes the cut-and-paste works, sometimes
not. I can't put my finger on anything distinctive in sketches that work
and slightly modified versions that don't.

I'd agree with both those observations. There is a lot of black magic
with cut and paste of graphics, not all involving Word.

The "sending" app offers up what its designers consider the most likely mix
of acceptable/useful formats. I wouldn't expect them to be able to guess
right every time.

But for exactly the same two applications under similar conditions, the
process should work ... similarly each time.


It was for this reason I was looking
for an eps with preview that actually worked in Word. And one that
would work on a PC too. A colleague had been given an eps logo from
Illy that he could neither view nor print on his PC.

You are using Word as a portable vehicle for viewing a graphic? I've seen
it done, but the results are often, ummm, unpredictable.

I'm after a foolproof way of providing templates in Word for PC users
to generate copy that will be later placed in InDesign for newsletters,
briefings and brochure type stuff. I want them to have a natural way of
approximating the final product for a first pass at copyfitting without
needing to know or even think about styles and stuff that lie behind
their templates. They'll want to co-operate with one another to get the
story right before the poor muppet who does the typography and the
final layout has to get involved.

Thanks for that description. Your concept makes a lot of sense and fills a
real need.

What I'm after is co-composition (or co-evolution) of graphics and textual
content. I find it easier to write when I can see fairly closely what the
final appearance will be, and that includes graphics.

I don't think I would have the guts to try to do what you are after in the
Word environment. Maybe it is wimping out, but I would be tempted to try a
web-based approach.


Dunno, but I saw something similar. Once I finally got an eps with
preview that appeared in Word (Photoshop 5 EPS as offered by Freehand
10's export, after the file had been through Illy and OmniGraffle), I
found that any attempt to resize the picture in Word caused the graphic
to disappear. It would still print to Ppppp...postscript printers but
its presence on screen was only detectable by clicking where it should
have been. Its bounding box would appear.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGG

That was the answer to your question above. Not yet fully resolved. I'm
still waiting on the last of snide comments from the victims.

LOL

There are
so many variations of eps on offer, each with various preview oprtions
that it takes on aspects of epidemeology.

LOL x 2.


Stepping back: Maybe the "preview--eps model" for graphics just isn't
sufficient! Or maybe we need better tools to manipulate and control the
two alternative representations.

Then I discovered that I could make the preview re-appear by switching
to normal view and back to page view. Sometimes the first attempt would
show a cropped version of the preview at the original scale, but
flicking between normal and page view again magically made it work
properly.

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGG AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGG

I should add that Mac Word handles PICT previews with more aplomb than
it does for TIFF previews, but that is not an option for my PC totin'
colleagues.

I assume you are saying this because you need to interoperate with our less
fortunate cousins on PC's, not out of any particular sympathy for them.

No no. Genuine sympathy. From my tests, Mac Word's favourite eps
preview is definitely PICT. PC Office does not do PICT. Another one it
handles well is DOS preview out of Graffle, but in monochrome.
"Photoshop 5 eps with tiff preview" as produced by Freehand 10 is my
current winner for cross platform predictability.

I have in the past had to deal with serious cross-platform problems, and so
I maintained a completely parallel Word set-up on a PC next to my Mac. That
has eased now, but the issues are never far from my mind.

Yes, TIFF does seem to be the best in my experience for this purpose, but I
think it also requires the largest files, too. For any given snapshot of a
document that isn't a big deal, but when I consider the evolution of a
document over months or years, the burden becomes significant.

<snip>
As I've replied to mmmmark, the workflow really suffers if the document is
evolving -- you spend more time with the process than doing the usually
minor changes to each as the document and sketch evolve

I feel your pain.

Thanks! Well, since you do, I'd like to explore this issue a little more:

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are quite different universes of Word
users. Some --maybe most-- users appear to view my concerns as completely
irrelevant, I guess, because _their_ graphics are completely static. I
suppose most people who incorporate graphics in Word are handed a set of
files and told, "Use these."

By contrast, I rarely know even what graphics I'll need when I start my
work, much less what each one will look like. Take your pick: maybe I'm
more of a generalist than most, or I'm a really poor planner.


Another good tip is to get the picture the exact size and dpi you need
in the final doc before you let it anywhere near Word. That's what I
meant about Word downrezing if it looked at it sideways.

Yes, for TIFF, I use the highest quality export, I forget which, which means
I suffer from LARGE intermediate files, which impose an additional load on
the system and my management of it.

I have had occasions where Word has refused to accept greater than 300
dpi tiff. I never pursued that for too long, since the large
intermediate file problem.

(I think you omitted the rest of the last sentence, but I can guess.)

"Refused" as in "barfed back"? (What were the exact symptoms?) Or simply
failed to take advantage of higher resolution?


In your workflow, I think I'd keep the graphics in Illy and paste
screengrabs in Word while the work was in progress, and then endure the
eps hassle once and for all at the end. I get away with that with my
colleagues, although sometimes they are happier with scanned pencil
sketches and leave me to make the finished diagrams in Graffle,
Freehand or Illy. The low tech way is good when you are dealing with
high priced talent whose first love is not fiddling with drawing
programs.

Thanks for the suggestion.

It never occurred to me to use screen grabs as place holders. Do you mean
my often-fuzzy copy-and-paste "grabs" or true grab.app operations or their
equivalent?

What about my recently-discovered alternative of using Insert->Picture->From
File with link-to-file enabled? So far, that is reliable --well, more
reliable than copy-and-paste-- and offers automated, mass updates at a
relatively small cost of a final cropping.

More often than not I get faxed back pencilled ribald
comment.

We all need comic relief!

For better or worse, I'm generally working on my own and only have to worry
about downstream users. (Will my final Word file render correctly on their
system? Can I produce good enough PDFs?)

Reduced to the most simple terms, I see graphic and textual context as,
well, the left and right hands of a piano player. One ought to be able to
type a line of text and draw a corresponding sketch, trading back and forth
as the content requires. Maybe I'm just spoiled, or maybe I simply
remember the evolution of Desktop Publishing since the 1980's.

Thanks,

Henry




--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

.

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