INCLUDEPICTURE from URL

[LAR]

I have a set of pictures of various sizes that are on a web server. When I
use INCLUDEPICTURE to merge them into a document, the pictures are merged but
the original size is not maintained. The pictures are distorted.

Oddly, if I copy these picutres to a local hard drive and refer to them with
drive and path (vs. URL) all works as expected.

This is WORD 2000. I've tried setting the attributes on the MAIN document
to BEHIND or IN FRONT but that destroys the INCLUDEPICTURE field.

Thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

LAR

 

[LAR]

No thoughts?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I did have a brief look at this and could not see any /Word/ settings that
would affect this particular behaviour, even what I assume is a
rarely-visited area of the Word options dialog box
(Tools|Options|General|Web options). however, if you haven't had a look at
those particular options before, it might be worth seeing if any of them
help in this situation.

I also wondered
a. what the "distortion" consisted of. I was assuming it was
stretching/crushing, but maybe something else.
a. what type of images you were using and whether or not that might affect
the end result. But the fact that the same images on the local hard drive
worked OK suggests that the format is probably irrelevant. But if Word is
doing something like looking at a MIME type set by the server, then I
suppose it could. However, if it is, I don't know how you would go about
checking that or changing it.
b. whether you are saving your mail merge main document as a .htm file or a
..doc. I'm not sure that would make any difference either, but Word uses some
(undocumented or not well documented) additional fields and switches to deal
with differences in .doc/.htm behaviour.
c. whether you might be able to fix the problem programmatically, during
the merge (using Word events) or after. But I think in order to do that, you
would have to be able to access the information about what the relative
dimentions of the pictures were supposed to be. For example, if they are 2cm
x 1cm pictures and they end up stretched to 3cm x 1cm pictures, if you
looked in the image properties ad could discover that one dimension had been
expanded to 150%, then a code-based solution might be workable.
d. Whether you might be able to put the images in one or more Word
documents, bookmark them, and use INCLUDETEXT to include them instead of
INCLUDEPICTURE.

I haven't done any tests that would suggest a solution or even that
replicate the problem - which was my main reason for not posting as I
thought someone else was far more likely to know some of the answers in this
case.

Then I tend to forget...

Peter Jamieson

 

[LAR]

Peter,

Thanks for the reply and the thoughts. In response to your questions:

a. The destortion varies. I could have been a little more specific here.
It appears that the pictures in from the URLs, which very in size, are all
being crushed into the same size/picture frame in the merged document. In
other words, the pictures that the URLs point at vary in size but the merged
pictures are a constant size.

Also, I have discovered that if I select each picture in the merged document
and RESET the picture size to the original, all is well. Problem is, that
there can be a lot of pictures to manually reset.

b. The merged document is a .doc. I can try .htm. Can you point me at any
information about these "switches"?

c. I can take a look at this but it seems complex vs. the manual reset I
descrived in a. above.

d. If I take this approach I think it will be easier to copy the pictures
to a local directory and INCLUDEPICTURE them from there.

Thanks again for the response and the thoughts. Any more would be greatly
appreciated.

Larry

 

[Peter Jamieson]

b. The merged document is a .doc. I can try .htm. Can you point me at

any
information about these "switches"?

Not really, I'm afraid. It looks from your other thread as if you've gone
for the "local folder" option. At some point I may be able to do a bit more
experimentation but I'm up to my neck in it at the moment.

Peter Jamieson