[texhax] PDF to EMF?

[Steve Schwartz]

On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 08:37 +0100, narke wrote:
> I was confused. You should know, when inserting eps in work, the font
> is so ugly.

Ah, well, I don't use MS Word unless I have to, and mostly to read
things other people send me. So googling I see that indeed MS doesn't
handle eps or pdf or anything else very well. I played with pstoedit,
trying to output into a format Word would import, but with mixed
success.

Here's another suggestion:

1 start from a good pdf
2 pdftops -eps file.pdf file.eps
3 open a new drawing in OpenOffice
4 Insert file.eps there
5 Export to an emf or wmf file.
6 Import the result into MS Word

I tried this with a small pdf I had (6kB or so). Step 2 bloated that to
20kB. Step 5 bloated that to 25MB (!), although this zipped down to 150.
Interestingly the resulting Word doc is 200kB. You can eliminate some of
this bloat by running

2a  eps2eps file.eps file_better.eps

which cleans up the eps (in my case it cut the resulting wmf by a factor
of 2).

You might also experiment with inserting file.eps into an OpenOffice
text document and saving that as a Word file. In my test, that looked
better (on screen at least) when opened in Word than inserting the eps
directly into Word.

As a final remark, you might look at some of the font options for
pdftops, which you can force to substitute standard fonts for any
embedded ones. Doesn't help if what you want to see are the original
fonts, but MIGHT just import better into Word.

And as a really final remark, you might complain to MS that you paid for
a piece of software which claims to import eps graphics but which
doesn't do so properly. [My guess is you wouldn't be the first.]

That's it. I'm MS'ed out.

Steve

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Professor Steven J Schwartz        Phone: +44-(0)20-7594-7660
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