Moving nice Illustrator images into nasty PowerPoint files
Category: Mac, Category: MS PowerPoint
Originally posted on my iBlog 1 November 2003.
MS PowerPoint X does not like Adobe Illustrator files, predictably. More frustratingly, it also does not support pdf files, and does not seem to have functional support for eps files.
Getting vector images from Illustrator into PowerPoint requires exporting the files as enormous Windows Media Files (.wmf). Even this step is not without its problems. To make a nice .wmf file that imports smoothly into PowerPoint, there are a few things I have discovered to avoid:
1) use only standard fonts at standard sizes with standard spacing. Anything else will be exported to wmf as an image, not text. The letter spacing ("AV") must be zero (especially for non-horizontal text).
2) Ungroup everything in the image before exporting to wmf. Grouped parts of the image sometimes turn up as pixel-based rather than vector-based images (especially when they contain text). Some of the images I have been using are graphs that have come in from Windows machines or Cricket Graph, and in both cases mutliple parts of the graph are permanently fused into one vector shape, which it seems can trip up the wmf export. These fused parts can be "ungrouped" using Object>Clipping Mask>Release. You can apparently independently select text in such fused objects by entering it with the T tool and then switching back to the cursor, to find that only that text object is selected.
3) Object>Path>Clean up removes all extraneous parts of the image. This can help get a smooth wmf file.
Originally posted on my iBlog 1 November 2003.
MS PowerPoint X does not like Adobe Illustrator files, predictably. More frustratingly, it also does not support pdf files, and does not seem to have functional support for eps files.
Getting vector images from Illustrator into PowerPoint requires exporting the files as enormous Windows Media Files (.wmf). Even this step is not without its problems. To make a nice .wmf file that imports smoothly into PowerPoint, there are a few things I have discovered to avoid:
1) use only standard fonts at standard sizes with standard spacing. Anything else will be exported to wmf as an image, not text. The letter spacing ("AV") must be zero (especially for non-horizontal text).
2) Ungroup everything in the image before exporting to wmf. Grouped parts of the image sometimes turn up as pixel-based rather than vector-based images (especially when they contain text). Some of the images I have been using are graphs that have come in from Windows machines or Cricket Graph, and in both cases mutliple parts of the graph are permanently fused into one vector shape, which it seems can trip up the wmf export. These fused parts can be "ungrouped" using Object>Clipping Mask>Release. You can apparently independently select text in such fused objects by entering it with the T tool and then switching back to the cursor, to find that only that text object is selected.
3) Object>Path>Clean up removes all extraneous parts of the image. This can help get a smooth wmf file.
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