Mac Forum / Applications / Word / March 2006

Copy and paste is _never_ the best solution to inserting graphics in any
application, particularly Word.  I don't use Illustrator on my Mac, but I do
on a PC at work and even there, copy and paste is spotty and dangerously
unpredictable.

You'd be further ahead using TIFFs like you said.  Even if it takes you
longer, it won't let you down in the end.  We also use .jpgs and .pngs in
Word with mostly success.

I've given up on .eps files in Word unless something changes.

YMMV.

-Mark

<snip>
You have my sympathy. I spent over an hour this morning trying to get
an eps with a Preview that Word would accept.

Yep, and tiffs are still rasters. Word seems to downrez everything as
soon as you look at it sideways. 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.

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.
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.

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'm with mmmmark. Take the extra time to insert picture from file.
Clipboard is always flaky, and Word's dealings wit the clipboard are
flakier than most. Also, if what you are doing is not going to high
quality printing, TIFF will be less trouble than eps.

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.

Arrange these words in correct order:
Breakfast Dog's Complete.

Do you notice that the latest Illy has an export to Microsoft Word
option? It flattens eveything out to PNG. I think Illy knows when it is
dealing with a spoilt troublesome child.

Hi Henry -

Re your 'extra credit' question, see inline below;

On 3/17/06 3:12 PM, in article C040581C.173EA%henryn@zzzspacebbs.com,

When you paste the image in its natural format it is being pasted as an
InLine object, when you 'Paste As Picture' it is pasted with Text Wrapping
applied. Note the *black* square handles around the image frame in the first
case as opposed to the *hollow* square handles in the second case.

Normal View only renders InLine objects, whereas Page Layout View renders
both InLine as well as those with Text Wrapping applied. Objects with Text
Wrapping applied can be dragged to anywhere in the document, but InLine
objects can only be situated in a line of text - they are treated as a
'character'.

HTH |:>)

Folks:

Word 2004 Version 11.2 (050714)
Adobe Illustrator 10
MacOS 10.3.9 fully updated

Two people on this thread suggested using Insert->Picture to work around
unpredictability of using Copy&Paste from Adobe Illustrator ("AI") into
Word.

If the text and the graphics are reasonably stable, this approach makes
sense. For one thing it works reliably!   So it is worthwhile dealing with
TIFF intermediate files -- or maybe some other format.

But if the document content and sketches are co-evolving a lot --a very
common scenario for the work I do-- then the overhead of editing in AI,
saving to an intermediate file, and importing into Word quickly becomes far
too tedious.

OK, I decided to experiment a little with Insert-->Picture-->From File and I
discovered:
 
 Word recognizes an AI (.ai) file as containing a picture!!!!!!

The .ai file format is not listed in the Enable choice, but .ai files icons
are --surprise-- shown in full-color (not greyed) in the
Insert-->Picture-->From File dialog.   So, I choose the AI file and hit the
Insert button.

Even more surprising:

  Word does the Right Thing (mostly) with the contents of an .ai file!!!!

Astounding!  

Thus far in my experiments, the contents of the AI composition frame
(Artboard) are rendered with no jaggies in the Word document.  Material
outside the composition frame is ignored, as it should be, and contents of
the AI file in currently invisible layers are also ignored.  The Word
document grows very little.   The result prints on a PS printer just as it
should, too.

I'm experimenting with an AI sketch developed as an overlay to some other
material. The AI file weighs a hefty 12MB, but the simple sketch actually
inserted in an otherwise empty Word document weights 48KB (that's "K") so
clearly there's nothing besides the sketch itself being transferred, and
Word is doing Exactly The Right Thing in this regard.

Further above, I said "...Right Thing (mostly)...".   So far there is only
one extra operation required:   The sketch arrives in Word with a bounding
box the size of the original AI Artboard.  Usually my sketches are smaller
than a full Word page, so in all these cases, I must manually crop them.

Now, what about those two options in the Insert-->Picture-->From File
dialog:

  [ ] Link to File

  [ ] Save with Document

I would expect checking the first one will mean that Word keeps a record of
the specified file.  When I select Edit-->Links-->Update Now, the contents
of all (selected) linked files are re-imported.    That's exactly what
happens, so far at least, so most of my complaint about using
Insert->Picture is addressed!   OK, I'll keep all my sketches paged-sized
and  crop them as a final step, no problem, it seems quite worthwhile.

Oh, sorry, I need to state tow more _preliminary_ conclusions   All the
experimentation I've described demonstrates that

  Word "knows" everything necessary to interpret AI files!

Or, at least, Word can clearly work with AI export mechanisms to do a pretty
good job.   And:

  Word's clipboard import is clearly uncoordinated with its file import.

Or, "The left and right hands..."

-----

Can my preliminary results described here be confirmed by further experience
and by others?    Please, folks, try this and post what you find.

One final issue: What's the full story behind the options on the
Insert-->Picture-->From File dialog?   Does selecting both

      [x] Link to File

      [x] Save with Document

mean that the result of linking is stored with the document, so, for
example, the fully updated document can be separated from the supporting
artwork?  And, also, what about the options in the Edit-->Links-->Update Now
dialog:

Update: [ ] Automatic  [ ] Manual [ ] Locked [ ] Save Picture in document

How do these relate to the two options listed above, and how do ALL these
options interact?   How is "automatic" enabled?  (Right now it is greyed out
for me.)   Some of these issues are addressed in the help topic

 Control how linked objects are updated

but on first glance it appears that some of the wrinkles may not be.

Thanks,

Henry

henryn@zzzspacebbs.com   remove 'zzz'