Re: Format of graphics in Word documents

["Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org>]

Ouch, there is is awful lot of ill-informed speculation going on here!

First off, Word stores embedded graphics in the original file format
if it is a format recognised by Word, and converts it otherwise to a
recognised format if there is a suitable filter installed. Recognised
formats include the following (this is probably not an entirely
comprehensive list)

- PNG
- GIF
- BMP
- JPEG
- EMF
- WMF
- EPS
- TIFF

When choosing a file format for embedded graphics, I would take the
following into account

1. If you have vector artwork available, embed in a vector format. EPS
is fine if you will print to a Postscript printer and don't need to
display the graphic on screen. Otherwise, I recommend making sure the
graphic uses the RGB color space and then converting to EMF for
embedding. (This conversion is probably much better done on a PC than
a Mac, in my experience Illustrator for Mac and other graphics
programs for Mac have an absolutely terrible EMF export capability.)
Using a vector format means you can scale the graphic as necessary
without loss of detail.

2. If you have a photographic image, or something similar which
consists largely of graduations without much in the way of sharp
edges, use JPEG by preference. Before embedding the image, work out
what size it will be in the embedded location and resize/resample the
image to the appropriate resolution before inserting it, to avoid
including excessively large graphics.

3. If you have a screenshot or other similar graphic that is mostly
solid colors and sharp edges, and you do not have the image in vector
format, use PNG by preference. There is no significant advantage in
using GIF over PNG. PNG is not limited to a 256 color palette, both
formats can do transparency, and PNG has the more efficient
compression algorithm. Again, resize/resample the image before
insertion.

Regards
Jonathan West
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