Exporting .emf (Enhanced Metafile) vector from Illustrator CS5 [and other versions tested] for use in MS office documents such as PowerPoint, can be a right pain.
If you export them at a sensible size, the vectors don't have enough points and you end up losing accuracy on your shapes and strokes - so they look very low quality.
If you make them bigger in Illustrator before exporting, the filesize remains approximately the same, but the vector accuracy is far better. But when you import into PowerPoint you have to shrink them down, which is frustrating.
I searched for a solution for hours, downloaded all the metadata editors I could find, but eventually worked out an easier method to resize / change resolution of the emf file - answered below...
The answer is just use PowerPoint to re-save the emf file:
Export your emf file 10 times bigger than required
Drag in into PowerPoint
Right click image and choose "Size and position"
Change the scale to 10%**, then on the "Position" tab, set it to be 0cm, 0cm from the Top Left Corner (so you don't lose it off screen). Then press OK.
Right click this (now correctly sized) image, and choose "Save as picture"
Save as an emf - it'll be the right size, and still high quality
Note that fonts can really screw up this process. Make sure all your text is outlined otherwise you're likely to run into problems.
** A commenter has found that their emf is about 15% too big when dragged into PowerPoint (so will be 11.5 times bigger instead of 10 times bigger). If you find this, instead of setting the scale to 10%, change the width in PowerPoint to the exact measurement (in cm) that it should be then continue instructions as above. Job done.
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Morning, everyone,
Quick question about PS2PDF. I use it to convert graphics that I produce directly in postscript to PDF. While there is no visual problem on PS files, I see a grid on my PDF viewer. At first I thought the problem was in the viewer, but it remains present when I compile my TeX files containing the figures with PDFLaTeX. Do you have any ideas for settings that can "fix" this display? Thanks in advance :)
Evince is independent of Ghostscript as far as PDF files are concerned, but I don't know how it can be viewing PostScript files.
I believe what you are seeing is an artefact of the PDF rendering engine in use, and the way the PDF file is constructed (which is itself dependent on the way the PostScript is constructed).
Much of the content is drawn by creating little rectangles which are intended to butt up against each other (and basically do). However, depending on the resolution, the precise numerical accuracy of the calculations and the accuracy of the co-ordinates, it can be the case that these rectangles do not quite touch ideally. There is a theoretical gap between them.
You can see this occur with Adobe Acrobat, and zooming in and out changes where the lines appear (it changes the effective resolution, thereby changing the calculations from user space to device space, ie to the actual pixels on screen).
I cannot say for sure that the same problem exists with Evince, but I expect it does. Withh Acrobat I can turn off anti-aliasing, which is where the problem really arises. Acrobat is attempting to insert an anti-aliased pixel between the two rectangles, which leads to these faint lines. Turning it off (In Acrobat X Edit->Preferences->PageDisplay->Smooth Line art) makes the lines disappear.
Ghostscript doesn't apply anti-aliasing by default, so these lines don't appear when rendering either the PostScript or the PDF files, but if I turn on anti-aliasing (-dGraphicsAlphaBits=4) then Ghostscript renders the lines in both the PostScript and the PDF file.
Essentially I think the problem is that your PDF viewer is using anti-aliasing and your PostScript viewer isn't, so they don't look the same.
I've been trying to create PDF files from my Visio drawings. My current method is very simple, just "Save As" pdf in Visio. One issue I have is that the inter-character spacing becomes uneven after the drawing is converted to pdf. I've attached two images here. The first one shows the original font in Visio and the other shows the distorted font in PDF.
Has anyone experienced this problem before? How would you suggest on fixing this?
Thanks!
I observed the same spacing problem with Visio 2013's export to PDF feature, but not when outputting a PDF using Adobe Acrobat XI Pro. It also appeared when pasting a Microsoft Visio drawing object or pasting and EMF from Visio into Word 2013; however, inserting a WMF from the same Visio drawing does not have the problem. I had just started using 2013 although 2016 versions were already available. I did not have the problem with Visio/Word 2007. -- 7/2016: I left most of my prior observations, but this, the issue appears to have been fixed by Microsoft Update.
The PDF generator is using a similar, but not the same font as Visio. The stroke weights of the examples you posted are not the same (note the horizontal lines in the 'e' and 't').
Try a different font.
Posting the PDF output itself would be very helpful, but from what you have said already, coupled with what you have shown in images, it appears that the Visio output is setting each character individually and getting the character widths wrong, thus the placement of each following letter is too far beyond the preceding one.
I'm not too sure of the baseline positioning, either, because the endpoint of that curving blue line below the "c" in the screenshots you posted is significantly closer to the text in the rendered PDF than in the initial screenshot above it.
See if Visio can deal with Courier first, as that is a monospace font (i.e. each glyph occupies the same width on the line). If it generates text in Courier that still shows wandering letterspacing, I would begin to wonder whether there's a newer/updated Visio release to seek out before continuing to fight with this.
This is apparently a long lasting bug in Visio. I still see it in my Visio 1708, build 8431.2250). The bug is at least 4 years here already.
The working fix to avoid kerning problems for single diagrams is to export them in any bitmap format (e.g. png) or Windows Metafile Format (WMF) or use screen snipping tools to copy diagrams from the screen.
From that, may be the solution can be in tuning the PDF renderer to produce set of raster images instead of using the embedded vector graphics.
Bug report on Microsoft Answers:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-word/font-spacing-kerning-issues-after-cut-paste-from/e930ec40-507f-4b25-9d72-c6c41b9d70cf
I have an A5 sized doc file that needs to be printed, yet the press needs them on A4 sized pages, centered, unscaled. When trying to export it from Office Word, you can adjust paper size, but only the left and top margins are kept and the content is spread in width to fill the paper (text size remains unchanged). I've tried PDF Architect / PDF Creator, but when it's about printing on A4 sized pages, the result is messed up fonts, messed up line wrapping and worse quality images.
Are there any tools that can preserve size, scale (in this case, centered and no scale), font, line wrapping and image quality as well or is it too much to ask from free tools? Proprietary tools are no option at the moment.
MS Word has poor options for exporting the PDF
I see some ways to resolve the issue:
Change size of paper in Word then manually recalculate and change size of margins (make like original page is in the center of bigger)
But best solution I see is to find appropriate options for printing device which should print the document (like "don't resize original doc pages, centered; output page size A4")
Try to emulate printing with http://www.dopdf.com/ (or similar) software. I'm pretty sure that it's possible to "print to pdf" with your requirements and then you got PDF which you can use for printing on real device
I am looking for a way to measure the coordinates of different rectangles on a PDF file?
Mainly I do have to perform some overprinting on an existing PDF and I need to know the x,y,w,h on where I am supposed to write the texts.
It seems that Preview.app on Mac has this ability but so far I wasn't able to find anything on Windows that does the same.
Please do not confuse this feature with the Measuring Tools from Adobe Reader which are used to measure distance in printed construction stuff, not the PDF page itself.
It seems that the default using of measure is point, so I need something that would allow to select a rectangle and that will tell me the coordinates.
Please do not suggest on exporting as a imagine and using something else to measure the pixels on the image.
Update: http://legacy.activepdf.com/support/knowledgebase/view.cfm?tk=rl&kb=11866 -- PDF Units, that's what I am looking for, something to measure the PDF coordinates in PDF units.
Disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft.
I know you said not to suggest this, but honestly, it's the easiest approach:
If you mean "sweep out a rectangle in the UI and report the coordinates", that's pretty straight forward, but it's going to be a build-your-own type of thing. What you will need are:
A PDF rasterizer (GhostScript, Acrobat, FoxIt, Atalasoft) to get you an image at a specific resolution.
A tool to display that image in a window and let you sweep out a rectangle (this is straight forward winforms type code for .NET, but we have a control that does this out of the box - combining 1 & 2 into one step).
A tool that can look at the structure of a PDF page and report back the crop box (if any) and the media box for each page (iText, DotPdf).
A tool/understanding of matrix transformations to build the matrix that goes from display space into PDF space (and/or vice versa, probably in iText, definitely in DotPdf)
The code flow becomes something like:
For each page:
Open document, pull out crop and media box, rasterize page, build transformation matrix.
Display image, build/hook into event for selection changing.
Push the image viewer rectangle coordinates through the transformation matrix.
Profit.
From a coding point of view (assuming 0 prior knowledge of this, but a decent understanding of linear algebra), from 3 days to a 2 weeks. If I were to write it, it would probably take on the order of a few hours, but I wrote most of our PDF tools and this is pretty easy.
If your goal is to intuit where rectangles are on the page and report back those coordinates, that's also doable, but it decidedly non-trivial in comparison. You need to write code that can rip through a PDF display list and interpret the contents correctly. That means being able to handle all the cumulative matrix transformations, the graphics state changes, the gstate object use, Form XObject placement, and so on. You need to answer the question "what is a rectangle?" because in PDF placement, it could be an re operator, a set of degenerate beziers, a set of lines, an image of a rectangle or (surprise!) a combination of all of the above. Honestly, intuiting anything about the content on a PDF page is a Herculean task.
I have a scanned greyscale PDF of a set of official school transcripts that has been compressed to 1MB. Actually, its 1023655 bytes. I am trying to upload the document to an online application that has a maximum file size of 1MB.
My attempts to further compressing the PDF via the same website have not worked.
I have tried using Neevia, but any further compression makes the lightest of the three pages completely white (the first two pages are black printed on a blue background, and third is light grey printed on a white background)
I've tried using mac preview to save as black and white (unreadable), and to resize it (blurry).
I have GIMP at my disposal, but otherwise I don't have any experience with photo or document manipulation. How do I shave those kilobytes off this PDF?
You could try looking at the bit depth of the grey scale. For example, if it's currently 16-bit grey scale (2^16, or 65536 shades of grey), you could try using an 8-bit grey scale (256 shades) or 4-bit (16 shades). You've already tried one form of this, going to 1-bit (2 shades, i. e. black and white), but without first taking a look at adjusting the contrast to make the text really stand out, you'll often end up with illegible files.
If you download and install CutePDF, you can open the PDF file and go to print it, select the CutePDF printer, and you will be prompted to save a new PDF file. Chances are this new PDF file will be much smaller,