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Using Mathematica figures in MS Word documents

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg85739] Using Mathematica figures in MS Word documents
  • From: Nazdrovje <nazdrovje at gmail.com>
  • Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:04:04 -0500 (EST)

Using Mathematica I'm able to generate lovely graphs and figures.
However, I'm almost always disappointed about the quality when I copy
them to Word documents (and I really, really need them in Word;
Mathematica as a wordprocessor is not an option in my case).

Copying as WMF (windows meta file) will result in most figures (except
the most simple ones with straight lines) to look ugly. Smooth lines
will be chopped into many wiggly line segments etc. I've covered the
font problem by having everybody that uses my docs downloading the
Mathematica fonts.

Copying as bitmap is also not really an option. On screen it's
acceptable, but printed it'll look ugly.

The only thing that seems to work is to export the graphics as EPS
with a bitmap preview and including this in Word. This yields good
output on the printer, and a somewhat less good (and less accurate)
preview on screen causing my textprocessing department to bug me with
questions about figure quality. Apart from that, it's a very clumsy
process, which also increases file size unnecessarily. At least I'd
like to have this as a menu option ('Copy as EPS with preview'). I'm
not sure whether a corresponding paste would work in Word, though.

I use lots of programs that are able to embed their graphics in word
as an OLE object (Statistica,Excel,Flowcharter). This seems to work
great as far as quality is concerned. Wouldn't this be an option for
Mathematica?

Any thoughts or solutions on this?


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