TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Visio to Word97 Conversion (from digest) From:Max Wyss <prodok -at- PRODOK -dot- CH> Date:Tue, 13 Oct 1998 10:52:48 +0200
David,
one thing you always must keep in mind. When you have a raster graphic,
such as a screenshot, you are stuck with a raster graphic, no matter
whether you convert it to a WMF, EPS, PICT or so (unless you process it
with a vectorizer, such as Adobe Streamline). So, when you have a raster
graphic, you can not easily scale it, even if you have placed it into a
vector format.
On the other hand, rasterizing vector graphics gets you to a certain size
and resolution, and there you are stuck. But there are cases where
rasterizing vector graphics is really needed. This is the case when you
have a very complex drawing from a CAD program. Redisplaying will then take
too much time, way more than with a raster graphic.
Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering AG
Technical documentation and translations, Electronic Publishing
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
>The problem with using screen capture is that you lose the advantage
>of vector graphic resolution and scalability. If you need to resize
>the graphic, or if you are going to publish the document as an Acrobat
>file, much of your effort to create the graphic will have gone to
>waste. Converting to WMF, EPF or some similar vector format will give
>you the best results.
>Since I don't know what you will do with the graphic it's hard to give
>specific advice, but here are some pointers that may help:
>*Keep the graphics as simple as possible. Break large graphics into
>several smaller ones.
>*Don't use a light typeface. Standard or bold is best.
>*Don't use hairlines for graphics or callouts. Most lossiness in
>graphics conversions is the result of thin lines disappearing when
>they're scaled. This is very common in Visio since a lot of their
>templates use fine lines.
>*A good way to experiment with this is to "select all" and increase
>line weight a point or so at a time. then convert. You'll soon figure
>out what the best settings are.
