Re: Advice please on Styles for cross-platform?
- From: "John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:09:18 +1000
Hi Graham:
Yeah, it's just so sad. Microsoft Office PC Program Group is just so
unbelievably arrogant -- they have not yet caught up with the idea that the
rest of the world expects it to "just work", and that if it doesn't, that's
NOT a reason to "Just buy Microsoft Office", that's a reason to "Buy
something else!"
EMF, WMF, PICT and QuickDraw are all based around CGM. But WMF can't handle
larger than 16-bit numbers, and QuickDraw has been deprecated in favour of
PDF on the Mac.
So yes: the reason to use EMF is to keep your rotated text. The reason to
avoid it is rotated text! Often you can get it to work by first pasting
into PowerPoint or Excel on the Mac (which both *expect* rotated text). Let
them convert to PICT or PDF (I'm not sure which they do: I think it's still
PICT) then paste that into Word.
I know that Microsoft has high hopes that if they just do *nothing* for long
enough, eventually the world will swing into line with them. Well, maybe
that would have been true if Mac had indeed gone broke. But it didn't. So
now, they need to get their cross-platform issues FIXED.
Because the first question that is going to be asked by any form of
Government purchasing authority, anyplace but the USA, is "Is it
cross-platform?"
And by that, we don't mean "Can you still read the text?" :-)
Cheers
On 29/7/06 3:25 PM, in article #eHHs9ssGHA.1632@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"Graham Wideman [Visio MVP]" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For the ultimate cross-platform experience, *Leave the damned things
alone*
is the best advise.
Hahahahahahha!
John:
Your previous reply (in the longdocs group) made me happy. This one gives me
a good laugh as well. You are now up to two beers.
No need to pontificate on the problems that untrained users and
not-using-Styles can create. I'm WELL aware of that in general!
But your comments on fonts, and what to expect from the MS ones vs others
were very informative, thanks a bunch for those. And yes I was aware of the
problems with bullets in general, but not the additional cross-platform
wrinkle.
And as for the use of Visio for drawings... over the last couple of weeks
I've done a bunch of testing on this going both ways: From Visio to Mac (via
Word), and going from graphics formats on Mac into Visio.
On Windows... Word + Visio, a beautiful relationship. Take that doc to Mac
Word, and look out for pot-holes!
It is pretty infuriating how we're at 2006+ and STILL the WMF/EMF rendering
on Mac *in MS products* like Word makes really stupid mistakes. Meanwhile
Adobe seems to be very dedicated to not being able to convert AI or PDF
formats *into* EMF (despite the fact they obviously render them in EMF to
show them on screen on Windows). [*] For heavens sake, even pasting from AI
to Word on Mac looks like a dogs dinner.
But back to Visio -- my tentative conclusion is that there are actually
quite a range of Visio drawings that can be usefully paste-specialed into
Word on Windows as EMF, and look pretty good on Mac. And even things not
rendering exactly right on Mac aren't disturbed, so when the doc comes back
to Windows the EMF looks good.
One needs to maintain a list of gotchas though, and they are the kind of
thing that regular users are not going to cope with well. Amongst top beefs:
-- The EMF rendering in Mac Word (2004) hides the bottom approx 0.3 inches
of the EMF. Workaround is to (in Visio) add some white feature below the
actual drawing to force the EMF size to say it's bigger, then use the Word
crop feature to crop off the invisible bottom of the EMF.
-- EMF 90-degree (vertical) text gets rendered in the wrong place on Mac
Word
-- Special characters (eg symbol font) don't work across platforms (they do
in Word text, but not in EMF embedded in Word.)
-- Some fill pattern and color combos don't work quite right
I have to admit, it's making sticking the damn picture in as a TIF (with
compression) look pretty attractive.
As for EPS -- yep, forget it.
[*] -- I did manage to get a PDF into a WMF by loading it into AI and saving
as WMF (or EMF, don't remember). That loaded nicely into Visio, but when I
ungrouped it the text all ran off to a pile in the corner. I guess that's a
Visio bug. It wouldn't surprise me if it was something as stupid as the WMF
text positions using unexpected scaling or negative numbers or something
legit that was just not tested by the Visio crew.
Anyhow, definitely pretty sad that MS can't get their own products to work
together properly. But I suppose it's miraculous that we at least have fonts
that work on both platforms in Word.
"John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:C0F118B3.410FD%john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Graham:
For the ultimate cross-platform experience, *Leave the damned things
alone*
is the best advise.
We have a whole website here: www.word.mvps.org It does not really
discuss
cross-platform issues, because we're too lazy! We tend to say "produce a
*good* Word document and it will 'just work' with no issues
cross-platform.
Produce a badly-formatted document and it will blow up in either place."
You're on the right track with "Styles". If you do all of your formatting
with Styles, you will get very few problems. If users employ direct
formatting, they're in trouble before they leave home!
On both platforms, Microsoft Word has around 140 built-in styles, and
around
40 included fonts.
The fonts included on the Macintosh version have been re-coded to
Microsoft's specifications (or by Microsoft Typography, in many cases) to
match as closely as possible their PC equivalents.
So Rule 1: Use the built-in styles, customising the font sizes and
leading
for your purpose.
Rule 2: Use the fonts Microsoft provided. Fonts of the same name
provided
by other companies may/will produce varying results.
Rule 3: Forget bullets and numbering. Bullets and numbering attached to
the Heading and List-series styles by someone who knows what they are
doing,
following Shauna Kelly's methods
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/index.html
will arrive and work fine on the Mac.
But unless you define the numbering into the style exactly right, it will
blow up when it crosses platform and you will get switches (often, numbers
turn to bullets or vice versa). Again: if you know what you are doing,
you
can fix it in seconds by re-associating the list template with the style.
End users who have not been trained will break it every time :-)
Use of PC fonts on the Mac is quite OK, but be aware that the hinting is
wrong for the Mac display so they will look bad on-screen. Just drag TTF
or
OTF fonts into one of the OS X font folders and they will work.
Going the other way, from Mac to PC, has a higher degree of risk. The PC
does not understand Mac font suitcases, so you have to dig the individual
font files out of the suitcases to use them on the PC. Depending on the
font, who made it, and how old it is, the Unicode assignments may be
wrong.
If they are, all hell breaks loose on the PC :-)
Be aware that much of the "stuff has moved around in my document" carnage
cross-platform is produced by the differing printing subsystems. On
either
platform, Word does not make either the display or the print job: it
simply
hands the file off to the operating system. All the measurements come
from
the printer driver in use. There's nothing you can do about this.
If a document is correctly formatted, you will never be aware of the
differences: each document will format and paginate and print perfectly.
If
the document contains blank lines and hard page breaks, allow plenty of
extra project schedule, because you will have to laboriously fix it each
time it changes platform.
Since I see that you are a Visio MVP, I need to warn you that the Mac
Microsoft Office can't cope with most of what Visio can do to it :-) I
suggest that you export to PNG. We can import WMF (badly...) but not EMF.
EPS is supposed to work, but usually *doesn't*. Nothing to do with
hyperlinks or properties will make it across :-) No SVG, no EMZ, and
definitely no Macros :-)
Hope this helps -- come back if you need more specifics.
On 29/7/06 1:17 PM, in article uTAu$1rsGHA.4252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"Graham Wideman [Visio MVP]" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Folks:
I'd appreciate any pointers, links to web pages etc that give advice on
setting up Word Styles to work reliably cross-platform. Ie: On both Mac
and
Windows. Main concern that I know about is how to specify fonts in a way
that works reasonably well.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Graham
--
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
--
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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