I need to convert several word docs that have text and a light background image into gif files. The freeware I have seen will do this, but the text looks terrible. Lossy. Any suggestions?
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- Ehhh, first question, why a gif file? Second: you can set the level of compression and colors with jpg and png images, if you software allows you to, but, a web browser is only 72 dots-per-inch, so the pages will either look lousy small or end up huge on-screen. Or third, you could convert the docs to PDF and they will still look nice (or post them online and someone else with the Acrobat-creation software could do it…).
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- Ehhh, first question, why a gif file? Second: you can set the level of compression and colors with jpg and png images, if you software allows you to, but, a web browser is only 72 dots-per-inch, so the pages will either look lousy small or end up huge on-screen. Or third, you could convert the docs to PDF and they will still look nice (or post them online and someone else with the Acrobat-creation software could do it…).
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I never understood why people encode a picture as a .DOC. At any rate, encoding a photo as .GIF is almost as bad. Better get the original encoder to send it to you as JPG or something more suitable.
I can’t imagine why you’d need to convert a .DOC to a .GIF. Why not just change it to .PDF?
I dont know why so many people are suggesting pdf? First, you have to have the full version of Acrobat to do it. Second, it gets converted to ps (postscript) first anyway. Postscript printer drivers are free as are ghostscript/ghostview for full windows usage. Or, if just have to have pdf without full version Acrobat, there is freeware software that does ps2pdf.
Per the original post, whats wrong with using Print Screen, then crop or change the image however you like in photoshop (or whatever image editing program you like)?
To DougC, png is lossless image compression. There are no parameters to set.
RealityChuck has the right idea.
Go here, and get Ghostscript and GSView and install them - Ghostscript first, and then GSView.
Install a “generic postscript” printer and set it to print to file.
Open your Word document, and print it out to a file using your “generic postscript” printer. Remember where you put the file - that is, directory name as well as file name.
Start GSView, and open your printed postscript file. Root around in the menus of GSView, and find the options for exporting to PDF. I don’t have it here (I’m running Linux, and use different software for this kind of thing,) so I can’t tell you exactly where it is. It is there, though.
Export to PDF, and pass the file on to whoever needed it or post it on the Internet, or whatever.
Is there some special reason why you wanted to export to a GIF? If you need to post it to the Internet, you could use Word’s own html export funtion and get something that will work - although it will be far from optimal, html-wise.
BTW, Sailor:
It doesn’t sound like there are any real pictures in the document, just some kind of background - maybe like a “watermark” or something along those lines.
I’ll still agree with you about not encoding pictures as .DOC files - a complete and absolute waste of effort. Except when you misuse Word to place multiple pictures on a single sheet of photo quality paper - and even then you run a very high risk of Word twiddling the colors and screwing things up.
My heart isn’t set on the gif format; that’s just what the software I have does. I basically just want text in a word document to be converted into a picture file. As far as pdf files go, no offense but viewing pdf files on webpages sucks, it takes too long to load, who knows what settings the other person has, and they need a program installed to view it. If png is lossless, I will try to convert the doc to png. Thanks for everyone’s suggestions.
Well, PDF does a bang-up job of representing a .DOC in an (almost) universally usable format that keeps the text as text and the images as images.
Nowhere is it said that the documents are single pages - and even single pages would look pretty crappy if you did a screenshot with the whole page on screen.
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To DougC, png is lossless image compression. There are no parameters to set.
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PNG uses lossless compression. It does, however, give you a choice between compression algorithms, and the choice between using 8 bit or 24 bit pixels.
If you use 8 bit pixels, you must reduce the number of colors used in the image to 256 - which is a loss in most cases (photos and such.) The compression after that causes no further data loss.
I don’t know what software you’ve used, but The GIMP gives me six options and a slider for the compression scheme.
Another vote for pdf. It’s the standard format for things like this. If you want anybody to, gasp, try to find a specfic passage in your document, how exactly do you expect them to be able to do that if you’ve converted it to an image format? For anything other than reading your document from beginning to end in one sitting, pdf is much better suited for the task.
And “pdfs take so long” because of the file size. I doubt your pictures are going to be much smaller in the end.
Also, there are pdf viewers that are designed to make “regular” pdf files somewhat viewable on non-standard devices, like Palms and PocketPCs, for portable viewing and easy reading that wouldn’t be possible for your picture files.
-lv
Just open a new picture file in an image program, paste the doc text into it & save as a gif.
If you think viewing PDF files sucks, then you’ll really be disappointed with the GIF or PNG files. The best you can get is a single image for each page of each document - a ten page document will require ten seperate downloads (granted, the browser can handle that,) but the images will look really sucky if you make them small enough to save any download time over a PDF. The PDF will let people download the file and read it and flip back and forth amongst the pages easily.
As a test, I’ve just converted a single page to the following three formats:
- PNG at 72 dpi=2.9Kb
- PNG at 300 dpi=24.1Kb
- PDF at 300dpi=29.0Kb
At a decent resolution, you don’t save a lot. The 72 dpi version was barely this side of legible - and that is with the smallest font set to 16. Your files would be larger, since mine was plain black and white text and no background. The other thing is that adding pages to the PDF wouldn’t add much more than the few bytes needed for the text to the file size.
Knowing what you want to do (show a Word document on a web page) makes things much easier - as mentioned above, use Word’s own “export to html” and create a set of Web pages that you can post to your site. The results will be much better than with the PNG or GIF files, and more portable than the PDF.
No it does not! PNG is based on the LZ77 (Lempel & Ziv, 1977) data compression algorithm. You may want to actually know something about what youre saying before opening your yap.
Whatever options youre talking about are NOT part of the png standard. The algorithm makes the file as small as it possibly can. Because its lossless there is no chance of intriducing artefacts.
Also, pdfs are going to be way smaller (look into text v image compression) than the same file represented as a 2D binary image. If you want more than one shade of grey (for the anti-aliasing seen in the text) your file size will go up accordingly. It just really doesnt make much sense to represent text in this manner. Whats wrong with <HTML>?
If you do go the PDF route I’d highly recommend PDF Creator. It works like Adobe Distiller; it creates a virtual printer which can output PDF documents from any program in one step. It’s free and easy.
I’m making the (possibly unfounded) assumption that you’re using Windows.
Actually, I looked up the PNG specs before posting. The specs do allow for more than one compression type.
Also, even within the LZ77 algorithm, you have a little leeway for how well you wish to compress the data. It mostly relates to how much time and effort you want your program to put into doing the compression - more time spent analyzing relates to a more efficiently packed (smaller) file.
Still, though, HTML or PDF is the way to go for the job being discussed.
Ok, I think I understand the question better. You want to display pages of text as graphics, not any photos. I do not know why you would want to do this as you cannot include links, etc., but anyway. . . GIF and JPG are the two only formats you should consider because they will be displayed by any browser. GIF is much better siuted for text because it does not blur the edges like JPG. There are several easy ways to go about this. You can capture from the screen directly. I have used this to generate some high resolution Chinese text for a box in a web site. Or you can have a virtual printer which will print to a graphics file. My fax program prints to a TIFF file which can be easily converted to GIF. You can use your fax program for this.
Do you have PowerPoint? You can paste your text from Word into PPT, (pasting from Word will require some manipulation to make it look good), or create the text natively in PPT and then export it as a GIF directly from PPT.
Once you have the text the way you want it, just go to File | Save as and choose GIF from the “Save as type” dropdown. If you want it to be a certain size, you can go to Page Setup and create the filesize there before exporting it.