OT: Best Resolution Image File to Import into Word?

Make us a list of useful things that the manned spaceflight program has delivered.

We could have had an amazing assortment of robotic and land-based science for the cost of the useless and smelly and deadly Shuttle and ISS.

Making a PDF is just a few clicks; it takes seconds. What takes time isn't driving Word, it's thinking and writing and reviewing.

My manuals look fine, and more important, are organized and make sense. People buy our stuff.

I have a couple of real plotter programs that can gobble csv data and make graphs. Excel is barbaric.

Actually, I prefer to plot points with a pencil, on grid paper, as I measure things. I may not need 5000 points if the first five tell me what the trend is.

TIFF format (professional image format, lossless compression, supported by most of the usual suspects) at least 300 dpi if you want to print at home,

I know in Crapture you can highlight all the items in a schematic and do a ctrl-c to copy. Then past it into word.

Cheers

??? EPS does good vector images (and cruddy bitmap images - so use the vector form) I think SVG has better features (gradient shading etc) but for block diagrams with only line art, text, and solid colour EPS should work fine.

I my last use of EPS was to translate some gerbers into line art for use in some documentation.

Inkscape is a very good vector image editor, you should be able to use that to rotate your image fairly easily.

SVG is a type of XML document and it can probably be rotated using a text editor but I'm know the details of the minor edit needed.

TIFF is probably the worst possible choice for import into Word as you can never be sure what is inside it. It can be lossless or it could be an encapsulated JPEG or several other lossy formats internally in a TIFF wrapper depending on what produced it. TIFF file format is a racehorse designed by committee - otherwise known as a camel.

PNG with the right number of colours for the content want to display is the way to go for smallest size and highest quality. Monochrome Line art may benefit from 4 or 16 colours if you want to avoid jaggies.

JPEG is hard to beat for photographs although J2k will do it easily but hasn't really made much of a dent in the market. JPEG is "good enough".

BMP is the one you must avoid like the plague.

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SVG

Thats what the boys in Washington use.

You *still* don't get it. The work of a few thousand people for a few years created inspiration for a few million people for a few decades.

I'm one of them, and have never worked in anything space-related.

Landing only robots on the moon would have been fun, but not inspirational the way Apollo was. JFK was right - he wanted something truly amazing. Musk has just done the same; almost useless but entirely inspirational.

Clifford Heath.

Depends on whether there's enough light. With enough light, shutter speed is fast and you don't get blur.

Maybe he thinks the money would be better spent on grandiose military parades and criminal investigation circumnavigation and tip toeing.

Hey! I know! Lets spend inordinate amounts of time negating previous passed laws and bills and all the labors that went into their making. That'll be good for the nation.

Inkscape is ok, but if you want to use the SVG as source code for animating in a web app, it isn't well-structured. However much it pains me to say it, Adobe Illustrator is unbeatable for the quality and cleanliness of its SVG.

Clifford Heath.

EMF is a minefield. If it works for you, great, but...

It is a sequential dump of the parameters passed to Windows GDI drawing functions. In some contexts, some of those parameters are ignored. The programs that call them often pass random garbage off the uninitialised stack, so the EMF contains the random numbers. That shouldn't matter, right? And on Windows, it mostly doesn't, because the same values are passed to the same GDI functions that ignored them the first time.

The trouble comes when anything else interprets the GDI data. Specifically, cases like someone on a Mac using Microsoft Word for Mac who opens a Word file, into which someone has pasted an EMF originally acquired via the Windows clipboard. Then the diagram goes haywire.

Even on Windows you can get mayhem, because some of the printer drivers, including the Postscript one, passes on the bad values to be used in creating the printed image. This results in unusable Postscript or PDF files, where the images either don't appear or are unusably scrambled.

One of the random values often seems to be "line width". So any line art that GDI renders correctly using the line width defined in the current DrawingContext (ignoring the random line width parameter passed into the line-drawing function), will get rendered with line widths big enough to cover the entire drawing.

This problem has existed for multiple releases of Windows, well over a decade now. Because it mostly doesn't affect Windows itself, Microshit has no interest in fixing it. They have a complete disrespect for their customers, in every imaginable way except as a captive source of ca$h.

Clifford Heath.

SVG is trivial to rotate. Drag all the content into a tag and rotate that. Or use a software tool that does that.

You can even animate the rotation in a web page, and it'll work at phenomenal speed, because the rotatable part will get rendered into off-screen memory in the graphics card, and composited into the frame buffer as it rotates.

Clifford Heath.

That surprises me. Usually Adobe's software is unbeatable in the inefficiency and absurd sizes of its files, as well as how far they stray from the standards (even when the standards were written by Adobe). Illustrator's pdf files can be unbelievably bad.

What??? You claim that shooting a junk car into space is in the same league as putting men on the moon? Good grief, how deep have you fallen?

Jeroen Belleman

Whilst I agree that the ISS is something of an international white elephant or boondoggle it is probably better than the alternative of former Russian rocket scientists helping rogue nations build ICBMs.

At the time robotics was hopelessly unreliable and clunky. The Russians managed to get less than 1kg with their own robotic lunar probes. (admittedly for much less money than Apollo)

It is a lot better than the worryingly high proportion of the US population today who don't think Apollo went to the moon :(

It was a really good publicity stunt although I would have been more impressed if they had injected the vehicle into the original planned orbit instead of flinging it randomly into the asteroid belt.

If you pay to have something put into a particular orbit you want to be sure it gets put there and not flung off into the far distance.

Even so it now means once again the USA has a rocket with the greatest payload lift capability of anything on Earth. Not quite as potent as Wernher von Braun's good old Saturn V but a lot more reusable parts.

Thanks, but this is exactly why I never warmed up to Linux. All the time you need to use this little script or that little routine.

I don't want to become a programmer, I just want to do CAD and document. PNG let's me do that with tags or script and is good enough.

I used Open Office long before there was Libre Office and I am not about to change now. It works fine for me and if it can't rotate SVG I am not going to use SVG but remain with PNG. IOW, if it ain't broken don't fix it.

I used Star Office until it became Open Office, Open Office until it was clear that the Go-Open Office fork was much better, then LibreOffice which took over from from there. Open Office has stagnated for 10 years or more - LibreOffice is actively developed and improves all the time. Even Oracle have scraped Open Office in favour of LibreOffice.

I do fully understand not changing just for the sake of it - I am no fan of continuously updating stuff myself. But if you ever do want a newer version, or need newer features, or better compatibility with MS ever-changing format variations, then I strongly recommend dropping OpenOffice and moving to LibreOffice.