Have you ever experienced this? You write a document in Microsoft Word, inserting images – charts or illustrations – along the way. Maybe you’re using a business drawing program to create them, like Microsoft Visio or SmartDraw. In Word, everything looks fine: the images show up smoothly, using the fonts you stipulated when creating them:
Now, using your favourite method (mine’s documented in my previous post), you create a PDF from the Word document. Depending on your method, different artifacts will show up in the images; in my example, the text labels on the cycle diagram don’t show up correctly – the fonts appear broken/blocky somehow, and – in the red portion – the text label appears to hover in a while block. Not acceptable for a business document:
This is one of those cases where the theory is better than the implementation: between Windows and Office, all sorts of copy-and-paste formats are available which should help circumvent this problem (Windows Metafile, Enhanced Metafile, etc.), but – depending on what applications you’re using – none of them seem to work very reliably or consistently. And the surprise always comes when you’re on a deadline…
The best workaround I’ve found is to follow this model:
- Export your image to a high-resolution PNG (Portable Network Graphics format) (explanation of “high resolution” below).
- Load image file into Word as if inserting clip art.
- Create PDF the regular way.
So what does “high resolution” mean in this context? There seem to be two reasons the artifacts are showing up. One is that fonts don’t seem to translate reliably when copying and pasting vector image formats (which is basically what Windows seems to do by default, to keep file sizes to a minimum). That’s why I am getting the weird white block in my text label. The other reason for bad looking images in PDFs is that the screen resolutions of many bitmaps aren’t a good match for the size of a page. More spcifically, what looks large and smooth on your screen at 72 dots per inch (typical screen resolution) will not be smooth enough for printing at 300 dots per inch. The software will scale the image to the size you’d like to see it at, and this may look fine on your screen in Word, but when you ‘print’ the document to PDF, your diagrams show up fuzzy or blocky.
“High resolution” basically means creating a PNG file from your graphics program at a size that makes sense for your page. If you’re printing on Letter size paper (8.5 x 11 inches), you may need your image to be saved as 2-4 inches wide (check your program’s page or canvas size settings, or there may be a dialogue during the Save As process).
This method typically creates quite a large PNG file (to contain all that image information), and it will make your Word documents and PDFs bigger in size, but your images will look smooth and – because you used PNG, a bitmap format – your fonts won’t have any artifacts.
Cumbersome, but it works. It would be nice if more application developers (thinking of you ere, Microsoft…) would ensure that copying and pasting between applications worked properly, but this is a surefire workaround for the time being.
Thank you soooooo much for the help above. I’ve been working on a sharepoint site for hours now trying to get the picture to come out clearer, I tried this and it finally looks decent.
We had this problem and there were two things we did.
1) If you are creating the PNG using Adobe Illustrator, choose the Save for Microsoft Office option to save the .AI file as a .PNG file. Be sure you save it at least 300 dpi resolution.
2) When you go to convert the Word file to .PDF, check that the software you are using for the conversion is set for “PRESS QUALITY” (Adobe Acrobat) or or “PRINT READY” (Nitro).