graphic export

[jeffosx]

Hi all, I have photoshop and illustrator in which I make diagrams and label charts figures etc. These ultimately end up in a word document as reports etc.

I cant work out how to take nice looking figures with dropshadows, transparency and in particular, text and keep it looking good for word. Somehow the text ends up fuzzy and graphics look like crap. I have tried tiff, gif, jpg eps and they all seem to look crap. Are there any other options apart from not using word. I have used inDesign to get around this but it doesnt help when someone needs to work on it and Indesign takes a fair bit of effort sometimes to get it looking smart...

any help appreciated.

Cheers

 

[mnkeybsness]

does it look crappy like that while you are working in word, or on the finished product? i would assume that word likes to display graphics with a little less quality than what you actually put into them. if you are talking about the finished product, then perhaps you should type your "reports, etc" in word and then get your hands on indesign and put all of your text into there.

 

[jeffosx]

Originally posted by mnkeybsness
does it look crappy like that while you are working in word, or on the finished product? i would assume that word likes to display graphics with a little less quality than what you actually put into them. if you are talking about the finished product, then perhaps you should type your "reports, etc" in word and then get your hands on indesign and put all of your text into there.

both working and finsifhed look crappy. I think your right with the workflow idea though, just have to try and not spend time fromatting in word also...

thanks

 

[scan300]

There's a difference to how something looks in Word on screen and how it prints.

If you anti-alias an illustrator file when opening in Photoshop, all of your line work will be anti-aliased, which means is will have fuzzy edges when printing. To have a sharp line picture from photoshop print well in Word, turn off anti-aliasing. Don't resize your work in photoshop with bicubic resampling, use nearest neighbor.

Work to the resolution of your output device. In the case of a laser printer approx 140ppi and above. Graphs and charts with sharp line work require more resolution (approx 300ppi) than photos which which can be rendered nicely on laserprinters at 100ppi.

You can also reduce the fuzziness of anti-aliased printouts by increasing the screen resolution to about 100lpi and above on your laser printer.

You can also produce vector type art which can be used in Word from Illustrator 10 by exporting to the .wmf (windows meta file) format. This is good for charts and line illustrations, but lousy for text.