> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Christopher Barker<chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: > > MS simply doesn't lay well with open vector formats, I think PNG with > > the right DPI, etc is still probably your best bet. > > > Yes, I think I have to stick to this option
I agree; in my experience, a bitmap such as PNG at about 600 dpi is the most robust, straightforward method for getting a reasonable image in Word on both screen and paper. By the way, I seem to recall noticing differences across versions of Word in the way they perform smoothing, anti-aliasing, or interpolation on displayed bitmaps. I can't remember which version(s) blurred them excessively, but Word 2003 is satisfactory to me. In case you still want to go for vector rendering, I'll mention that I have had some success with tools to convert to EMF. One way to go is pstoedit, but you already mentioned having difficulty getting it working. (Anyway, you might have needed the shareware EMF driver [http://www.helga-glunz.homepage.t-online.de/plugins/], depending on your quality standards.) Another possibility is Adobe Illustrator; it can read EPS and export to EMF, and I've been pleased with the fidelity. I've found that it doesn't always identify the fonts correctly, but I've worked around that with Illustrator's font replacement command. A third approach (untested by me) is to install a virtual EMF printer, such as http://emfprinter.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.mabuse.de/tech-vprinter.mhtml. Save your figure as a PDF, open in a PDF application, and use the print dialog with your EMF printer to write an EMF file. (It might also work to save as EPS, open in GSView, then print.) You might end up with a bounding box as large as your paper size, but in Word you could manually crop to the actual image. With any of these approaches, I recommend watching for defects. I've found that such conversions often get something wrong--the coordinates of the primitives get rounded (to the nearest 1/72 inch, I'm guessing), or you get hairlines instead of the line width you wanted, or the image size is wrong. If the screen display is less important than a hard copy or a PDF version of your document, the following might work for you: Save your figure as EPS and place that in your Word document. Older versions of Word will display a box placeholder, while newer versions of Word contain a simple PostScript processor and will display a bitmap that bears a passing resemblance to your figure. Regardless, the EPS is still there and should be delivered to PS devices, such as a physical printer or a virtual printer like PDFCreator. If you want to get really fancy, you can embed a high-resolution bitmap into the EPS file as a preview and get a better on-screen version, too, although with newer Word versions you might need to defeat the built-in PS engine for your preview to prevail. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
