open mac word 5 documents in mac word x

[Wolfgang Ihloff]

Hello,
I am facing problems opening my mac word 5 documents created on macos 7 on
my mac osx office x system.
The two problems I face are:
Images are not inserted in the right place
Image quality is less good

Especially the image quality is a problem. A few words on the images in
those older documents: they were created with CricketDraw or Freehand 4/5
and I do not have the originals at hand anymore.
Another things that stuck me: On screen of the mac os 7 system the images
dont look as high-res as they print out later. However they look as
unhigh-res on the osx system just like they print out later.

So what can I do about it? Should I convert the pictures to word 6,7 first?
Is there a good converter tool?

Thanks for any help

Wolfgang Ihloff

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hello,
I am facing problems opening my mac word 5 documents created on macos 7 on
my mac osx office x system.
The two problems I face are:
Images are not inserted in the right place
Image quality is less good

Especially the image quality is a problem. A few words on the images in
those older documents: they were created with CricketDraw or Freehand 4/5
and I do not have the originals at hand anymore.
Another things that stuck me: On screen of the mac os 7 system the images
dont look as high-res as they print out later. However they look as
unhigh-res on the osx system just like they print out later.

So what can I do about it? Should I convert the pictures to word 6,7 first?
Is there a good converter tool?

I tried on a graphic I have that was created in an old Freehand and
stored in a template that originally came from Word 5. Freehand MX
would not touch it on a copy and paste from Word, nor would
GraphicConverter deal with the eps. It might have done if I had the
Ghostscript extender in place, or eps converter. I have had bad
experiences with those in the past. (font problems) It might be worth
trying with more modern versions.

I think you hit the eps problem. Word v.X makes special effort to print
the ratty preview instead of the underlying eps. (I don't know about
CricketDraw, but Freehand vector art had to be turned into eps to get
it into Word 5).
This should not happen if you have a Postscript printer though. Are you
using the same printer on OS9 and OS X?

Word v.X excels itself when attempting to print pdfs. Even though pdf
is postscript done right, it will use the preview when printing to pdf.

I have discovered an excellent workaround, which might help you if you
have a non-postscript printer on the OS X system.

When printing from Word, choose output options, print to file, and
choose postscript. Word *does* use the underlying eps when printing to
a postscript file!

Open the result in Preview (you need Panther's Preview for this) It
will automatically convert the ps to pdf. Save or print the result.

If you have not upgraded to Panther yet, do so. Preview is worth the
money all by itself. When I want to read long Word documents without
editing them, I now print as pdf and use Preview to read them. It is
blazingly fast, keyboard nav is excellent, and indexing and searching
is also wickedly quick. If only this were the way Word worked. If we
had this feature instead of "remove red-eye". Ah, we can but dream.

PS. A similar technique (printing to ps, then printing from Preview)
appears to allow one to print 2-up double sided to a non-duplex
printer. I have not yet got all the magic for paper handling and print
direction completely straight in my head in an infallible recipe, but
when I do, I'll put it up here. I know a lot of us have been trying to
do this for some time.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Elliott,

When you get this material together, please also send it to John McGhie for
possible inclusion on the mvps.org/word site. That would be great!

Cheers,

--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>

 

[Wolfgang Ihloff]

When printing from Word, choose output options, print to file, and

choose postscript. Word *does* use the underlying eps when printing to
a postscript file!

Open the result in Preview (you need Panther's Preview for this) It
will automatically convert the ps to pdf. Save or print the result.

If you have not upgraded to Panther yet, do so. Preview is worth the
money all by itself. When I want to read long Word documents without
editing them, I now print as pdf and use Preview to read them. It is
blazingly fast, keyboard nav is excellent, and indexing and searching
is also wickedly quick. If only this were the way Word worked. If we
had this feature instead of "remove red-eye". Ah, we can but dream.

Thanks for the advice. That gets me one step closer to my task.

Anyhow I still need to edit the document on the the OS X Platform with
Office X - opening pdf/eps/ps for editing is not possible with Word X.

After all the best solution would be a converter changing my documents
without loss of images or imagequality to Word X documents.

Thanks

Wolfgang Ihloff

 

[Elliott Roper]

Thanks for the advice. That gets me one step closer to my task.

Anyhow I still need to edit the document on the the OS X Platform with
Office X - opening pdf/eps/ps for editing is not possible with Word X.

After all the best solution would be a converter changing my documents
without loss of images or imagequality to Word X documents.

Sorry Wolfgang, I went off on another topic with the eps printing rant.
I should have noticed that english may not be your first language. I
should have worded my reply more carefully.

As I understand it, the graphics in your Word 7 documents are eps from
Freehand 4/5 and Cricket Draw. I think you will have to copy them and
paste them to an application that understands that old eps version -
Try Adobe Illustrator, then save them again as an eps for importing
back into Word. It seems from your evidence that Word v.X is not
understanding the eps produced by Cricket Draw and Freehand 4 when it
comes to print them.

Word will still screw up the on-screen representation, but this time it
may print OK.

Word v.X appears to be broken when it comes to printing and displaying
eps graphics.

 

[Wolfgang Ihloff]

That worked not too bad - but yet another problem arised:
Word 5 creates the ps files but on opening those on mac osx through
the viewer or using ghostview i get a little problem with german iso
characters in the grafics. Wherever there should be a ö ä ü i just get
a ' .

Any ideas how that happend? Same problem on opening those files on
Windows 2k thorugh ghostview.

Thanks

Wolfgang Ihloff

 

[Ramón G Castañeda]

That worked not too bad - but yet another problem arised:
Word 5 creates the ps files but on opening those on mac osx through
the viewer or using ghostview i get a little problem with german iso
characters in the grafics. Wherever there should be a ö ä ü i just get
a ' .

Any ideas how that happend? Same problem on opening those files on
Windows 2k thorugh ghostview.

Thanks

Wolfgang Ihloff

Wolfgang,

Does that happen with any font or just with Arial and New Times Roman?

There was a known bug in the earlier version of those fonts that affected
so-called "special characters". It affected printing as a PS file as well
as printing on some Level 3 PS printers. Microsoft released a Core Fonts
Update as a free download:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx

 

[Wolfgang Ihloff]

Does that happen with any font or just with Arial and New Times Roman?

There was a known bug in the earlier version of those fonts that affected
so-called "special characters". It affected printing as a PS file as well
as printing on some Level 3 PS printers. Microsoft released a Core Fonts
Update as a free download:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx

The thing is this - it only happens to characters within a grahic
withing word 5 - so I cannot open those or change their text - however
they still change. The grahics must be quickdraw, aldus freehand 4,
adobe freehand 5 or Cricket Draw 1.1.

Still anybody got an idea?

Thanks so far

Wolfgang Ihloff