PADS schematic into Word doc

If I highlight the page and copy, then go to Word, Word doesn't recognize that there's anything to paste. Copy/Paste in PADS is purely internal, probably some internal vector format. Everything is vectors.

Ah, well. It works for Altium, and has worked since the days of Protel Schematic on 16-bit Windows, as well as for a few other programs I have used. So it was worth a try.

Personally, I'd use a pdf printer (like pdfCreator - use a free one) and then import it into LibreOffice Draw to manipulate and pull out the bits I needed. Make sure you turn off options like grids or background colours before printing to the pdf - it will make your pdf's far easier to work with. Then when you have done the editing in Draw, paste it into a LibreOffice Writer document.

(Actually, I would of preference use pdfLaTeX rather than a word processor. And I might use Inkscape rather than LibreOffice Draw, depending on what kinds of manipulation are needed.)

We often print schamatic and fab drawings to PDFs. That looks great and has full resolution; you can zoom way up to see details. To get that into Word, Irfanview can convert the PDF to a TIFF.

I ordered Universal Document Converter, a Windows printer thing that can directly make TIFFs and other formats, and I'll see how that works.

The Windows clipboard saves the copied item in multiple formats, so when you paste it, it can choose the best format. One of those formats is WMF (Windows Metafile) which is basically a sequence of GDI drawing primitives, i.e. a vector format. So Altium is probably using that, and Word will definitely prefer it over pixels.

Lazier software authors only provide the rendered pixels, so you get crap.

Clifford Heat.

TIFF is a bitmap format - you get a snapshot at a particular resolution. If you can, keep it in a vector format (like SVG, or LibreOffice Draw format) - it will be much more efficient, and scale properly. I don't know if Word supports SVG - I haven't had it installed on any of my systems since 16-bit WfW days.

It does, depending on the source. There is a long-standing bug with the support, where some parameter must be correctly initialised or the width of a line becomes huge (like, several inches) and obliterates the image. I think the same bug occurs with some WMF drawings too.

Ultimately, you have to just suck it and see.

lot

If you have Pro Acrobat, there is an "export" function. Once you have print ed to PDF, you can then export to EPS. (EPS "images" can be inserted into W ord.) All the vector graphics detail will be there. Searchable text will be there. I have done this many times.

FILE>EXPORT>POSTSCRIPT>ENCAPSULATED POSTSCRIPT

For some stuff, you may need to mess with the bounding boxes in the EPS fil e. This is in the header section. An EPS file is a text file.

%%BoundingBox: -118 264 550 704 %%HiResBoundingBox: -118 264 550 704 %%CropBox: -118 264 550 704

This may be doable with free tools like Ghostscript. I don't know because I don't need to try.