Placing PDFs

[Alfred Scott]

I'm working on a translation of an old Italian book with a number of technical illustrations.

Way back, I used LaserPrint to create the eps files to put in Word and InDesign and the eps files always looked great.

Now when I create a PDF from PowerCADD with the Print command, I get a pdf file just fine, and I can crop it in Acrobat Pro, but when I import it into Word X (not the very latest one) it does not have crisp, hard lines.

In Acrobat, I can save it as eps, and then I get no screen preview but the lines look great. I suppose I can live with this but would prefer not to.

I can open it in Illustrator (the only possible use I can think of for the program!) and save it as eps. Now I get the preview and it prints great, but when I crop it in Word, I get goofy stuff on the screen, where it continues to show the selection box that exists before I cropped it.

Anybody know how to deal with this?

Alfred

[Alfred Scott]

Good grief. I just answered my own question on this one.

In Acrobat Pro, when you save as eps, you can choose to include a TIFF or PICT preview.

Alfred

[How Goes It]

It's unfortunate that we have to have expensive programs (Illustrator, Acrobat Pro) for importing and exporting EPS files into and out of PowerCAD, as was also discussed here -- http://powercadd.DesignCommunity.com/topic-19182.html

[Derek]

Alfred,

I used to go through the same process of using EPS files to get drawings into Word however Word 2008 now handles PDFs directly. The images appear correctly in the Word document and print correctly.

I tend to use Adobe's PDF Printer (this comes with Acrobat) to create the PDF from PowerCADD. It is more powerful in the options you can set but, of course, that means the process can be more complex to setup initially.

The process also generates good PDF files when I 'print' the whole Word document to a PDF using Adobe's PDF Printer at the end of the process.

Word X was the only thing holding me to EPS files but those days are now behind me. (Hmmm, I wonder how long it will be before I have to eat those words?)

Versions:
OSX 10.4.11
Acrobat Pro 8.1.2
Word 2008 12.1.0

Derek (nearly version 45, still in beta)

[Greg]

After struggling with MS Word and its peculiarities in dealing with graphics for years, I have gradually switched over to using Pages (part of the Mac iWork suite) for all my work. So much more intuitive to use, and an almost identical interface to Keynote and Numbers.

For me it has actually replaced Word and InDesign for technical reports and proposals with lots of graphics.

Well worth trying and much less expensive than the alternatives.

[patrickm]

[Alfred Scott]

How does Pages work in terms of exchanging files with MSWord?

Alfred

[Greg]

Actually translation works pretty seemlessly in both directions. There are a few minor features of each (Pages & Word) which are not supported, but there is usually an alternate way of doing it in each program.

The only time I use Word now is if I know that I will need to send the document to others several time (like jointly writing a document), otherwise I use Pages and save as pdf to send to others.

[pbacot]

Hey Patrick,


You guys are paddlers? That's great. My wife and I paddled with Keoua (Honaunau) when we lived on the Big Island, regatta and long distance. We should have kept it up, it's a big commtment. The local club here paddles in a river, not quite the same. Must be nice off Santa Barbara.

I too use Pages except when working on documents from others. I find there can be slight format changes and these can throw off pagination etc.

Peter

[poolvibe]

[paulprd]

Hi Alfred

Open it in Preview and then save it in any one of the mutiple formats that give the best results.

JPEG is pretty good as is PNG which is also vector. You can also crop and tinker a little.

Hope this helps.

Paul

[Alfred Scott]

Paul,

Thanks. I ended up getting good results by print/save as pdf from PowerCADD, then cropping in Acrobat Pro and saving as EPS. It's a two-step process but it works flawlessly.

Alfred

[JohnMorse]

PNG is a raster format. Some extensions can be used by particular programs to add vector data to a PNG file, but the basic file format is a raster image.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/cover.html