Re: Using Mathematica figures in MS Word documents
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg85776] Re: Using Mathematica figures in MS Word documents
- From: dflatin at rcn.com
- Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:57:45 -0500 (EST)
- References: <fphd7c$8lu$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Feb 20, 9:24 am, Nazdrovje <nazdro... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
When forced to use MS Word, which is most of the time for my
professional work, I resort to exporting to a bitmap format. PNG works
well for plots with simple colors because it compresses pretty well.
Otherwise, consider JPEG or TIFF. I agree that WMF almost never
produces acceptable output. I really don't understand how people in
technical professions ever bought into standardizing on MS Word. If
your textprocessing department will accept pdf, you can do much better
with LaTeX, and use Postscript formats for your graphics.
--
Dan