Mac Forum / Applications / Word / February 2006

I am preparing a preprint for an IEEE conference using Word 2004
(version 11.2) on a Mac G5.  I have plots (line art) in EPS format from
Adobe Illustrator that I want to use.  When I import the EPS file into
Word, although a blurry bit-mapped image appears on the display, the
nice EPS image is output when I print the document.  Unfortunately,
Word outputs the blurry bit-mapped image to the PDF file that I must
submit to IEEE.

As an alternative I exported the EPS image from Illustrator as a
Macintosh PICT file.  Word imports this format and it looks nice on the
display.  Unfortunately, in both the printed output and the PDF file
generated by Word any rotated text (like the labels on my plot
ordinates) have fine lines from the base of the first character in the
text string to the top of each successive character in the string,
effectively obliterating the text.  As a test, I re-imported the PICT
image back into Illustrator and printed it successfully.  So the
problem must be with Word.

I have already tried exporting/importing the other popular bit-mapped
formats such as GIF, PNG, and JPEG and have fussed with their
optimizations -- they all produce blurry images.  Illustrator outputs
vector formats too, but it seems Word cannot import them.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?  Any suggested work-arounds?