inserting Word .docs as graphics
Jean Richardson
I've been helping a friend on the phone this morning with a perplexing
problem. She has a set of Word documents that are essentially a set of
forms and the instructions for using the forms. She has been scanning the
forms, outputting the scanned documents as graphics, and then importing the
graphics into the main Word document. All of these documents have headers
and footers, and she needs the headers and footers in each form to display
within the headers and footers of the main Word document. There is no need
to create a TOC or index.
The challenge is to skip the cumbersome scanning phase and somehow insert
the form files as graphics. She has tried .pdf'ing the forms and inserting
them in Word as Objects, but all she gets is the icon image. The field Link
and Ref options also don't do the trick because of formatting problems and
dropping the form's headers and footers.
Any suggestions?
-- Jean
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| I've been helping a friend on the phone this morning with a perplexing
| problem. She has a set of Word documents that are essentially a set of
| forms and the instructions for using the forms. She has been scanning the
| forms, outputting the scanned documents as graphics, and then importing the
| graphics into the main Word document. >
Is your friend named Brigitte? This problem sounds familiar:
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0211/techwhirl-0211-00522.html
She could also try screen-capturing the forms, and inserting them as
graphics. But if you're not careful the text can get mangled.
Has she considered inserting the forms as another SECTION of the document?
Might run into a couple of header/footer challenges, but you'd have far
more control of the appearance and clarity of the forms...
Keith Cronin
People do the darnedest things with Word
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Bonnie Granat
| The challenge is to skip the cumbersome scanning phase and somehow insert
| the form files as graphics. She has tried .pdf'ing the forms and inserting
| them in Word as Objects, but all she gets is the icon image. The field Link
| and Ref options also don't do the trick because of formatting problems and
| dropping the form's headers and footers.
|
This is what I did once: I displayed the Word document (or the part of it that
I wanted in a graphic) in Print Preview at the size I wanted the graphic to
be. Then I took a picture of it with SnagIt and made a .gif. I should think
your friend could do that with forms, but maybe I'm missing something.
Bonnie Granat
http://www.editors-writers.info
617-354-7084
Gary S. Callison
References: <001001c28bfd$5b644580$31c2...@merant.com> <004601c28c0e$3b491030$8d051342@Bonnie>
On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, bgr...@editors-writers.info ("Bonnie Granat") wrote:
| | The challenge is to skip the cumbersome scanning phase and somehow
| | insert the form files as graphics. She has tried .pdf'ing the forms
| | and inserting them in Word as Objects, but all she gets is the icon
| | image. The field Link and Ref options also don't do the trick
| | because of formatting problems and dropping the form's headers and
| | footers.
| This is what I did once: I displayed the Word document (or the part of
| it that I wanted in a graphic) in Print Preview at the size I wanted
| the graphic to be. Then I took a picture of it with SnagIt and made a
| .gif. I should think your friend could do that with forms, but maybe
| I'm missing something.
Assuming W2K, here's how to make a print-to-JPG printer driver. You need
three pieces:
1) a windows printer driver that only prints PostScript
(I'm using the Apple Color LaserWriter 12/660PS),
2) a thingy called 'RedMon' from
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/index.htm> to create a
printer queue that redirects the printer queue to STDIN for a
program, and
3) GhostScript <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get704.htm>
to turn the PostScript into a JPG.
You do this by installing RedMon and GhostScript, adding a new printer
(I call mine 'Print-to-JPG'), under 'Ports' choosing 'Add a new port',
and pulling down 'Redirected port' from the list. After you've added the
printer, you go to the Properties pane for that, and on the Ports tab
there's a button for 'configure port'. Configure the port as follows:
Redirect this port to the program:
C:\(full path to the Ghostscript executable)\gswin32c.exe
frinstance, mine says:
C:\Progra~1\gs\gs7.04\bin\gswin32c.exe
Arguments for this program are:
@C:\(full path to the config file)\jpeg.rsp -sOutputFile=C:\(full path to
where you want the output to go)\output.jpg -
(that space and '-' sign on the end there are important)
again frinstance, mine says:
@C:\Progra~1\gs\jpeg.rsp -sOutputFile=C:\Docume~1\callisong\MyDocu~1\mypict~1\tmp.jpg -
Output: Copy temporary file to printer
Printer: (name of a printer. Doesn't matter, we're not printing anything)
Run: Normal and check 'Run as User'
Then you need to create the config file.
In notepad, I wrote my C:\Progra~1\gs\jpeg.rsp to look like this:
-Ic:\progra~1\gs\gs7.03\lib;c:\progra~1\gs\fonts
-sDEVICE=jpeg
-r600
-dNOPAUSE
-dSAFER
-sPAPERSIZE=letter
where the first two args are paths to the \lib & \fonts directory, and
the -r600 is the resolution you want in dots-per-inch. 72 looks blocky,
but 600 makes a one-page screencap take up about 2 meg- I'm more
interested in 'pretty', but if you just want a quick & dirty look at
what the page is going to look like, '-r72' will probably work just
fine for you. Or something in-between. I like to resize my images myself
for the specific need I have.
Then whenever I get a 'printer selection' dialog box, I choose
'print-to-JPG', and whatever the printer would have spat out appears as
a JPG in the file I set the path & filename to in the args to GhostScript.
You can also get a thing called GSView
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/index.htm> (which requires that
Ghostscript already be installed) and just set up a 'print-to-file'
printer using a pure postscript driver, and use GSView to look at the
output. This way it'll prompt you for a different filename each time
you print something, and then you can look at multiple *.ps files with
GSView. This spares you the whole bother of installing a printer queue
redirector. ...but I prefer JPGs. More portable, easier to wedge into
documents & stuff.
I don't know why Windows doesn't have a 'print preview' built into the OS
instead of in individual apps, but this is one way to see what a
printout would look like without actually killing trees.
--
Huey
Jeroen Dekker
A good way to get documents out of Word and towards a graphics format is to
print it 'to file' to a printer format, for example PostScript or PDF. That
gives you the whole form as it would look on paper, including your headers
and footers. If a raster image format like TIFF suffices for your needs,
then you could open the PDF in Acrobat and export it as such. Don't use
JPEG, it is not well suited for content like forms.
If you want the form to remain scalable and editable, then you might want to
consider our (commercial) ps2vector software to batch convert the PostScript
files to WMF (Windows Metafile), the native vector format of MS Office. You
can simply import these into your document, scale them to fit your page
without losing quality or sharpness, edit graphical elements and text
strings if needed. In a vector format, your forms will render at optimal
quality to any size/resolution screen or printer. These things are lost when
going with bitmap-based solutions like screen capture, scanning etc.
Jeroen Dekker
--
PS2vector - The Graphics Connection to
* MIF for FrameMaker
* CGM for SGML and IETM systems
* WMF/EMF for MS Office
* SVG for XML and the Web
Visit http://www.square1.nl/index.htm
Tel. (+31) 71 364 8657
jer...@square1.nl
From: "Jean Richardson" <je...@bjrcom.com>
Date: 14 Nov 2002 08:44:28 -0800
The challenge is to skip the cumbersome scanning phase and somehow insert
the form files as graphics.
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