Word/2004 and images.

[Matt]

Hello,

I have searched for clues, and while I've found excellent background
(thanks especially to John McGhie for his thoughtful response
s) as to why these compatibility issues exist, I now need to get things
working; the rubber has, as they say, met the road.

I have documents that must be electronically published. I'm not at my
home computer right now, so I'm unable to attempt various w
orkarounds. I'm running: Office 2004 for the Mac, and I'm attempting
to view with a WinTel version of Word: Word for Office XP (W
ord 2002). The images are embedded by dragging design elements from
OmniGrapher into Word.

What is the recommended workaround for this?

1) Is there any way to get images to display properly in a WinTel
version of Word? I've actually got the Quicktime/Decompressor message
that I've read a bit about, but I'm sure it's all related to that way
in which Office 2004 (for OSX) handles images, per your previous
message. For details, read message: Jan 30th 2005, Re: Images from
Browsers, among other threads I find on the Net.

2) For those who simply need a read-only view of my documents, will
exporting to PDF do the trick? I've got both the full version of Adobe
Acrobat, and of course, Quartz's inherent export feature.

I would rather not have to perform screen dumps.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[matt neuburg]

The images are embedded by dragging design elements from
OmniGrapher into Word

This might not help, but let me tell you what we do at TakeControl
(publishers of electronic books, including a book about Word 2004 by
Moi). Never drag *anything* into Word. Take a screen shot and / or save
as an image file - munge or change format with GraphicConverter if you
have to; then use Insert Picture (from file) to place the picture. This
way you know exactly what you are getting, plus you have original pix to
go back to if there is a problem. All our screen shot images in the
TakeControl books are TIFFs; this gives us all the pixels, as it were.
TIFF is standard and cross-platform, so the document opens fine on
Windows (it has to because we use Windows to generate the final PDFs),
plus in the final PDFs you can decide what resolution to embed the TIFFs
at, so a high resolution is possible (i.e. the image may be reduced in
size, but behind the scenes all the pixels are still there and the user
can see them by zooming in if desired). m.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Yes. And exporting to PDF will assure that the received file is identical
to the sent file.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Matt]

Thanks Beth & Matt,

What is the short-term and long-term outlook for maintaining
cross-platform portability for EDITING Word docs?

PDF will be ok for my publishing purposes (my 1st problem), but what
about multiple people contributing to the same Word file being passed
around?

Thanks,

Matt L.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Matt:

See my other response: Word XP had a bug in its distribution CD -- they left
the required converter off. This was corrected in Office XP Service Release
1, from memory. If you run Office Update, it should come down automatically
for you.

There's no vector format that is truly bullet-proof cross-platform. PDF
will work. EPS will work for anyone that has a PostScript printer. But a
lot of the industry is moving to high-res JPG these days, basically because
every software vendor wants to do their own thing with the various vector
formats.

It's probably long overdue for something such as the IETF or W3C or ISO to
stop the rot, get everyone locked in a room and not let them out until they
have agreed on a format and a reference implementation!

Cheers

Hello,

I have searched for clues, and while I've found excellent background
(thanks especially to John McGhie for his thoughtful response
s) as to why these compatibility issues exist, I now need to get things
working; the rubber has, as they say, met the road.

I have documents that must be electronically published. I'm not at my
home computer right now, so I'm unable to attempt various w
orkarounds. I'm running: Office 2004 for the Mac, and I'm attempting
to view with a WinTel version of Word: Word for Office XP (W
ord 2002). The images are embedded by dragging design elements from
OmniGrapher into Word.

What is the recommended workaround for this?

1) Is there any way to get images to display properly in a WinTel
version of Word? I've actually got the Quicktime/Decompressor message
that I've read a bit about, but I'm sure it's all related to that way
in which Office 2004 (for OSX) handles images, per your previous
message. For details, read message: Jan 30th 2005, Re: Images from
Browsers, among other threads I find on the Net.

2) For those who simply need a read-only view of my documents, will
exporting to PDF do the trick? I've got both the full version of Adobe
Acrobat, and of course, Quartz's inherent export feature.

I would rather not have to perform screen dumps.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Matt

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Matt]

It certainly is a shame, John.

Standards... hmmm....

I've found that standards stand in the shadows de facto standards.
Case in point is W3C's vector-based web graphics format:

SVG vs. PDF
SVG vs. Flash

When was the last time you saw an SVG-enabled website?
;^)

The best idea/technology does not always win, does it?

Perhaps the hesitant adoption of a standard vector format hits too
close to home for me; I was a CAD draftsman/designer in my previous
life (circa '85), and consumers' obsessions with raster-based graphics
drives me crazy sometimes.

Thanks Again,

Matt