I started a new job a few weeks ago, doing electronics assembly and helping update the procedure documents. Problem is, they are currently done in Word, which completely sucks for the purpose. I have InDesign installed on my computer and I’ve been trying to convert to that, but when I try to import the pictures from the Word document they get pixelized all to hell. It seems if I first import to Illustrator and change the print size, save the image separately, then import to InDesign, it works OK, but I don’t want to have to do that for all the images. If I need to I may be able to access the original images from the CD archive, but that would probably be even more of a hassle.
The documents are laid out like this: At the top of the first page is the company logo, possibly a few other logos, the model name and part number of the item to build, and the revision date. The main body has the step number and text on the left, and an image on the right. Generally the image is a 3x5 photo of the part in question, but it may be differently shaped or there may be multiple images in some cases. Ideally the text and images should be tightly bound, so that modifying, adding, or deleting one step will automatically adjust the document as a whole, without breaking other steps’ text and images apart. (This is the part where Word gets really horrific.)
So, anyone have any tips? Upgrading software is probably not in the cards in the near future. Also, I don’t have Internet access at work; apparently some idiot sent porn email to everybody in the address book so they cut off all unnecessary access.
Word is not a good images-management program. According to my experience–which is broad, but not exhaustive–you’ll have to find the original files.
I’ve had the same problem many times, and that was what I finally resigned myself too. The last place I worked had the entire company on PCs, and the production room on Mac. So every doc that came in had been created, by the original author, in Word, but I had to edit it in InDesign. I hope you bill hourly.
InDesign may only be showing a low-res image during editing, were you aware? Did you try exporting a Word-sourced document to PDF and seeing what the images in it looked like?.. I have an older version (InDesign 2 I thinks) and it only shows you a lower-res version during editing, so all the images look like crap. They only look normal after you export to PDF and look at that.
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Bill hourly? Ha! I’m not a high-falutin’ consultant, I’m just a temp-to-hire regular employee who is still learning the ropes. The closest experience I have to InDesign before this is doing class projects in PageMaker 6.5 back in college. Also, I don’t have unlimited time to spend on the documents, as I also have to build the units.
Exporting the document from Word to PDF looks fine. The problem I have is in copying and pasting the images from Word to InDesign. It’s not just a display problem, the pixelization is the same on test printouts. I’ll try exporting the whole document from InDesign to PDF tomorrow, but I’m not convinced InDesign is receiving the proper image data in the first place.
I recall that, when copy/pasting from some-other-app to Word, I would have a similar problem. The solution, in Word, was to “paste special” and choose what format I wanted that was so special, and one of them worked like a charm. Dunno if InDesign has a similar capability, try it.
Caveats: you’ll need Acrobat-full (not just Reader), and you may need to adjust the output settings so Acrobat doesn’t JPEG the crap out of images in the output document when you ‘print’ to PDF from Word.
Well it seems you can import Word, PDF, and a few other formats into InDesign, although Word files with pictures may or may not survive the journey intact. In any case, I haven’t had much chance to work on any documents lately, because management has decided I’d be of more use in the warehouse moving 160 lb. plasma TVs around. I mean, why should they hire warehouse temps when they can just pull me off my duties? It’s not like I’m doing anything important. :rolleyes: