I’m trying to make a logo graphic that can be inserted as a picture in MS Word or Excel documents.
These documents will be printed on coloured paper – ergo, the background must be transparent.
I’m working with Adobe Illustrator 9.0 and Photoshop 6.0, but apparently, I don’t know what I’m doing. No matter how I try, I end up with a white square surrounding my logo.
The logo itself is just text – two large script initials in a ligature, with two lines of text across the centre.
Any suggestions? I’ve spent four days trying to figure this out.
If you’re doing a drawing in Illustrator, your best bet will be to export the file as a WMF file. Convert the fonts to outlines in Illustrator before doing the export as I’ve had bad luck with Illustrator exporting live text to WMF format.
In Photoshop you can try exporting the graphic as a GIF (if’t not too complex. Or even TIFF with an alpha channel, although the latter has worked only about 50% of the time I’ve tried it.
Between MS Office app’s mediocre graphic support and Illustrator’s poor WMF export filter it’ll be a crapshoot whether it works or not. To tell you the truth, when I need to export images to Word I use CorelDRAW which has a much better set of export filters.
Portwest, if your logo is saved as a .gif, .bmp, or .jpg file and then inserted into Word or Excel, then the following will work:
insert your picture/logo into the Word document using the menu commands
left click (single) to select your logo that is now in your document. a picture toolbar may appear. if it doesn’t, then right click on your logo and from the menu that appears, choose ‘show picture toolbar’.
move your mouse over the picture toolbar that appears on the screen. there are several buttons and (on mine) the second button from the right says ‘set transparent color’ when the mouse pointer hovers over it. Left click once on this button.
now move your pointer over to your logo. click on the white background to set ‘white’ as the transparent color.
this means that EVERY white pixel in your logo will now be transparent, so if you have any white that you want to remain in the logo itself, you will have to go back to your logo design (in Illustrator or Photoshop) and set an unnecessary color for the background, like hot pink or neon green or something. Then you can follow the steps above and choose the hot pink background to set transparent.
I have done this myself plenty of times, so I know it works. I’m not sure what other image types it works with (tiff? .art?) but I know that sometimes I’ve had to ‘convert picture to office format’ or something like that before continuing.
I’m still confused about the question, perhaps I’m over-simplifying it in my head.
So here is my utterly stupid question:
If the paper is coloured, but the image is not itself on a coloured background (say inside the cell of a table that is coloured or grey) then why does it matter if the image is in a white box? The white won’t be printed - there’s no white ink only the absence of colour*.
*Assuming this isn’t going to be screenprinted or anything where white ink could apply.
Whiskey-Hotel, I wish I had CorelDraw, but I’m stuck with the software I’m given.
Eats_Crayons, the paper itself is coloured. But what you say makes sense – there is no such thing as white ink. I hadn’t actually tried printing it before – I saw the white box and simply indulged in my private little hissy-fit at the keyboard.
Tangent, the non-printing of the white square notwithstanding, I think you’ve got the software solution. I didn’t know one could change the background in Word.
You all are simply great. I really appreciate your sharing of expertise.
Actually some printers have white ink. My old Alps dye-sublimation printer did. (Complete with a warning that says “will not appear white on a transparency” )
scr4 - yup, at my last job we tested printer for dye-sub ink that could use white ink (hence my discalimer hinting at more advanced applications), but I was assuming that if it was a matter of printing from Word, chances are that we were talking about a standard, desktop bubble-jet or lazer printer. (The dye-sub ink jet printer was VERY cool, but alas, too slow for us, so our company never bought it.)
Whiskey - No, what was confusing me was the “coloured paper.” In Word, you can set your screen setting so that the page appears coloured, so you can see the layout as it will appear on the actual page - but the coloured background is for previewing purposes only. That colour does not print out and it’s easy to confuse yourself.
So I wasn’t sure if Port meant that the image was going over a true coloured background (to be printed in CMYK), or if it was just the display settings and the printer would be printing out B&W on a coloured piece of paper.
Portwest - no worries, it’s a common mistake when you take your preview as gospel. A friend of mine did the same thing. You get entrenched in the notion that “what you see is what you get”. She was getting seriously annoyed until a colleague reminded her that she would be printing on a B&W lazer printer.
At work we call that a “D’oh Moment.”
And now, thanks to Tangent’s excellent instructions, when the day comes that you actually DO use a background (say like in a table or some such) you’ll have no problems dropping in an image with a transparent background. So nothing lost at all.
