Images Turn Blue

[Steve]

I've got a long document that I created in Word 5.1 and updated in
Word X. It includes literally hundreds of inline illustrations that
were all created in ClarisWorks and just dragged over into Word. They
started as screenshots and I added additional explanatory text in
Clarisworks. Thus they contain bitmap and vector art.

I now want to update this thing and create a PDF. If I stay in Word X
all the images look okay but the text in the images have become
bitmaps and they look badly pixelated. If I import into Word 2004
every image with text turns blue -- there's nothing in the yellow
channel -- but the text looks good. If I import into Word 2008 the
same thing happens, but if I save as a docx file and then reopen the
images change. No more blue -- but now the text looks bad again.

Does anybody have any idea what's happening here? The notion of
redoing literally hundreds of illustrations is pretty daunting!

Many thanks in advance for any help anybody can offer.

Steve Cohen

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Steve:

What is happening here is that you are being hit by a succession of bugs in
Word's ability to handle the graphics format in those documents.

It sounds like the original images are QuickDraw format, and Word has never
been able to handle them properly.

Try opening in Pages or TextEdit and see if they can get the pictures out
undamaged.

Cheers

I've got a long document that I created in Word 5.1 and updated in
Word X. It includes literally hundreds of inline illustrations that
were all created in ClarisWorks and just dragged over into Word. They
started as screenshots and I added additional explanatory text in
Clarisworks. Thus they contain bitmap and vector art.

I now want to update this thing and create a PDF. If I stay in Word X
all the images look okay but the text in the images have become
bitmaps and they look badly pixelated. If I import into Word 2004
every image with text turns blue -- there's nothing in the yellow
channel -- but the text looks good. If I import into Word 2008 the
same thing happens, but if I save as a docx file and then reopen the
images change. No more blue -- but now the text looks bad again.

Does anybody have any idea what's happening here? The notion of
redoing literally hundreds of illustrations is pretty daunting!

Many thanks in advance for any help anybody can offer.

Steve Cohen

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Steve C.]

John,
Thanks for responding. Yes, I'm pretty sure these are Quickdraw images
(or Picts, which is roughly the same thing, I guess). But Pages
(v2.02) and TextEdit can't handle them at all. Pages almost seems to
do okay -- you can see the images -- but then, before actually letting
you work with the file, it says that it can't handle the image
borders, and after that all the images are blank rectangles. TextEdit
does even worse -- none of the images appear at all. NeoOffice doesn't
help either. Nor does Nissus.

I've been able to get some of the images out of the Word file using
FileJuicer, but even with that, many can't be opened.

I relied on Word for all this and everything worked fine in Word 5.1.
In fact the whole workflow was very easy -- just create the image and
drag it over. But Word has totally failed me now. What I need is the
vector text of Word 04 and the color handling of Word 08. Can't seem
to have both.

Any idea why those images are all blue? Maybe there's a clue in
another post talking about color space?

Thanks again,
Steve

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Steve:

Yes, I would suggest that in computer graphics, images are composed of
either three (R,G,B), four (C,M,Y,K) or five (H,S,B,L,A) "layers" or
"channels".

My guess is that the images were originally in CMYK and in the conversion to
RGB they have dropped everything into the Blue channel instead of converting
the colours accurately.

Word 5.1 was Word 6 and Word 95 on the PC. You will still find some PCs
around that have them installed, or at least have the disks for them filed
somewhere. That might get those pictures back for you...

Cheers

John,
Thanks for responding. Yes, I'm pretty sure these are Quickdraw images
(or Picts, which is roughly the same thing, I guess). But Pages
(v2.02) and TextEdit can't handle them at all. Pages almost seems to
do okay -- you can see the images -- but then, before actually letting
you work with the file, it says that it can't handle the image
borders, and after that all the images are blank rectangles. TextEdit
does even worse -- none of the images appear at all. NeoOffice doesn't
help either. Nor does Nissus.

I've been able to get some of the images out of the Word file using
FileJuicer, but even with that, many can't be opened.

I relied on Word for all this and everything worked fine in Word 5.1.
In fact the whole workflow was very easy -- just create the image and
drag it over. But Word has totally failed me now. What I need is the
vector text of Word 04 and the color handling of Word 08. Can't seem
to have both.

Any idea why those images are all blue? Maybe there's a clue in
another post talking about color space?

Thanks again,
Steve

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Steve C.]

Unfortunately, these were almost certainly RGB images from the
beginning. They started as screen grabs, went in to Clarisworks, text
was added, and then were cut and pasted into Word (5.1). I doubt that
any of those steps would have involved CMYK.

Part of what makes no sense here is the difference between how Word 04
and 08 handle these images. In 04 they're blue but the text is
scalable, which is critical. In 08 the text looks terrible but the
images are full color. Same file -- just saved in two different ways
(doc and docx).

I suspect that there are several bugs, layered one on top of the
other, in the style of an archeological dig. I'm waiting for delivery
of Word 08. But I won't be trusting Word nearly as much now as I used
to.

Thanks again for your thoughts --
Steve

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Steve:

Yeah, there is a layer of bugs in play here, like the skins of an onion.

This is a "channel inversion" problem, and we have had that for years in Mac
Word.

Word 2008 has some of the same input filters. If the input filters can't
handle the format, they convert it to a bitmap, and that's the issue you end
up with.

There's a trick you can do with a .docx: internally, it's a little packaged
"website". If you make a copy and change the extension to ".zip" (because
that's the compression in use) you can then open it up, and in there you
will find a folder containing all of the graphics, normally in .PNG format.

But if the filters were able to fin any vector images, they will be in there
too. You might get lucky... Note that for this to work, you would have to
open the Word 5.1 files in 2008 ‹ once they have been through an earlier
version, the images will down-level to bitmaps when Word 2008 gets hold of
it.

Cheers

Unfortunately, these were almost certainly RGB images from the
beginning. They started as screen grabs, went in to Clarisworks, text
was added, and then were cut and pasted into Word (5.1). I doubt that
any of those steps would have involved CMYK.

Part of what makes no sense here is the difference between how Word 04
and 08 handle these images. In 04 they're blue but the text is
scalable, which is critical. In 08 the text looks terrible but the
images are full color. Same file -- just saved in two different ways
(doc and docx).

I suspect that there are several bugs, layered one on top of the
other, in the style of an archeological dig. I'm waiting for delivery
of Word 08. But I won't be trusting Word nearly as much now as I used
to.

Thanks again for your thoughts --
Steve

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Steve C.]

John,

Very interesting. The zip trick is great. And, along with your
explanation, it reveals some things. I've got Word 08 running now and
have done some tests.

If I import the Word 5.1 file directly into Word 08 I get exactly zero
images. All are replaced with empty image bounding boxes. If I import
into Word X everything is visible there, but text in many images (but
not all) is now converted into bitmaps. If I save that and import into
08 I get the blue images, with some scalable text. If I save as .docx,
there's no more blue but most images now do NOT have scalable text.
So, whatever I do -- no love. (Word 04 doesn't add anything to this
picture -- it does what Word 08 does to the doc format.)

If I extract the docx using the zip trick a few of the images are
scalable -- they're saved as both pngs and pdfs and the pdfs seem
okay. There are still lots of picts in there, but the text is no
longer scalable.

Overall -- not much success at all. It seems like if 08 could import
the 5.1 images correctly maybe I'd be okay. But only Word X can do
that. 08 sees no images at all.

Of 380 images, almost all are going to have to be remade from scratch,
and I sure ain't lookin' forward to it. I suspect that I will not be
embedding anything into Word, ever again.

Think I'll get any help if I call tech support at MS?

Thanks again for sticking with this --
Steve

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Steve;

PMFJI, but I've been following this all along. Even considering what John
has pointed out I can't help but emphasize that one of the major probable
causes of the problem you're running into is having dragged the images into
the files in the first place. I don't mean to be critical, but the dragging
method is rivaled only by Copy/Paste as the worst possible choice when it
comes to placing graphics. The inevitable result is "lowest common
denominator" based on the rudimentary function of the operating system.

Any images to be included in another type of document - regardless of
program or version - should be added via the Insert> Picture> From File
method. That allows the program to process the images with its internal
graphics filters whereas the other methods result in conversion to PICT in
earlier versions of Mac OS -- OS X has now adopted PNG in place of that.

I certainly can't guarantee that you'll always get the *preferred* results
but the Insert method will typically produce *more acceptable* results

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Steve C.]

Thanks for jumping in. I'll take all the help I can get.

I understand your point and, needless to say I've learned my lesson
very powerfully. But Word 5.1 had no problem with these images. I was
easily able to create .ps files which were printed at high quality. As
far as I can remember, opening the image from the desktop didn't make
any difference in quality relative to having Word import it. And as
far as I know, there was no way to "place" the image as you apparently
can now, where all you're doing is linking to a file on disk. Word 5
had to own it and include it in the document.

Anyway, whatever I did wrong back then, the problem is what to do now.
Got any ideas?

S

 

[Clive Huggan]

Print the images as large as you can in Word 5 and scan them?

Since you asked, Steve: I wouldn't bother to phone Microsoft Support over
this: Word 5 was made before most of them were born. It will be way off the
radar...

CH
===

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Steve:

It's not even "Word 5.1" that you're missing. It's the old QuickDraw module
that existed in Mac OS, which all of the clients used to handle these
pictures.

A PICT is a metafile, just like WMF on the PC side (only different!).
Effectively it contains a "bitmap layer" and a "vector layer".

Without the Mac OS version of QuickTime none of the modern applications can
decode those pictures. See if you can find a Mac with OS 9 running: chances
are, software on that will be able to get those pictures open because the
QuickTime import filter will be there.

However, most modern applications will simplify the pictures into bitmaps
during the conversion process. So you may not want to spend too much time
on this.

Cheers

John,

Very interesting. The zip trick is great. And, along with your
explanation, it reveals some things. I've got Word 08 running now and
have done some tests.

If I import the Word 5.1 file directly into Word 08 I get exactly zero
images. All are replaced with empty image bounding boxes. If I import
into Word X everything is visible there, but text in many images (but
not all) is now converted into bitmaps. If I save that and import into
08 I get the blue images, with some scalable text. If I save as .docx,
there's no more blue but most images now do NOT have scalable text.
So, whatever I do -- no love. (Word 04 doesn't add anything to this
picture -- it does what Word 08 does to the doc format.)

If I extract the docx using the zip trick a few of the images are
scalable -- they're saved as both pngs and pdfs and the pdfs seem
okay. There are still lots of picts in there, but the text is no
longer scalable.

Overall -- not much success at all. It seems like if 08 could import
the 5.1 images correctly maybe I'd be okay. But only Word X can do
that. 08 sees no images at all.

Of 380 images, almost all are going to have to be remade from scratch,
and I sure ain't lookin' forward to it. I suspect that I will not be
embedding anything into Word, ever again.

Think I'll get any help if I call tech support at MS?

Thanks again for sticking with this --
Steve

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Steve C.]

Hi Steve:

It's not even "Word 5.1" that you're missing.  It's the old QuickDraw module
that existed in Mac OS, which all of the clients used to handle these
pictures.

A PICT is a metafile, just like WMF on the PC side (only different!).
Effectively it contains a "bitmap layer" and a "vector layer".

Without the Mac OS version of QuickTime none of the modern applications can
decode those pictures.  See if you can find a Mac with OS 9 running:chances
are, software on that will be able to get those pictures open because the
QuickTime import filter will be there.

However, most modern applications will simplify the pictures into bitmaps
during the conversion process.  So you may not want to spend too much time
on this.

Cheers











--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia.   mailto:[email protected]

Okay, I guess that leaves me with this question, the bottom line, as
it were:

Is there any way to get the original images out of the original 5.1
document?

With the right OS I can print that doc properly -- so the images are
in there, undamaged. Can I extract them so I can reuse them in a new,
modern document? (For what it's worth, PICTs seem to open and are
editable in Adobe Illustrator under OSX. I just can't get to the
images.)

Thanks again,
Steve

 

[John McGhie]

Steve:

I thought I explained that? You need to re-create Word 5.1 and ClarisWorks
on an OS 9 computer.

You should be able to copy the pictures from Word and paste them into
ClarisWorks (maybe even into the old version of Illustrator).

If it's going to save you that much time, it's worth spending a couple of
thousand to track down the old equipment and software you need to re-create
the old environment. You may even have everything you need among your
backups?

Cheers

Okay, I guess that leaves me with this question, the bottom line, as
it were:

Is there any way to get the original images out of the original 5.1
document?

With the right OS I can print that doc properly -- so the images are
in there, undamaged. Can I extract them so I can reuse them in a new,
modern document? (For what it's worth, PICTs seem to open and are
editable in Adobe Illustrator under OSX. I just can't get to the
images.)

Thanks again,
Steve

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Steve C.]

Steve:

I thought I explained that?  You need to re-create Word 5.1 and ClarisWorks
on an OS 9 computer.

You should be able to copy the pictures from Word and paste them into
ClarisWorks (maybe even into the old version of Illustrator).

If it's going to save you that much time, it's worth spending a couple of
thousand to track down the old equipment and software you need to re-create
the old environment.  You may even have everything you need among your
backups?

Cheers



...

read more »

Sorry John, you did. But I think we've established that the images are
there, I can see them in Word X, and they contain vector data. I'd
like to simply extract them in OSX. They can be edited -- in OSX --
via a modern copy of Illustrator. I understand that I can only print
the file in OS9, but given that I haven't lost them, and I can open
them in Word X, I was sort of hoping I didn't have to recreate the old
environment. Apparently I do.

Thanks again for your help.

Steve