I'm being sent some tech reports in Word.doc format that contain
illustrations that were clearly created originally as vector graphics,
and are now (apparently) in PNG format.

Can I extract some of these graphics in such a way that their vector
character is preserved, and they can be edited in Illustrator or other
vector graphics programs?

I think these graphics must retain some kind of vector information in
the Word document, rather than just being stored as raster graphics,
because if I blow them way up on screen in Word the lines and text
labels remain sharp and unpixelated.

But if I Select, Copy and Paste individual figures from the Word
document into Illustrator documents they seem to be raster only -- or at
least individual objects in the figures are not selectable.

If I print the document to PDF, then Extract the figures from the PDF
document, they sometimes seems to come out as vector images -- but I'm
not certain about this.

Acrobat has an "Export Images" menu command that allows you to pull
images out of a PDF document. Is there such a thing in Word? (I've not
found such.)

GraphicConverter likely to be helpful here?

Word 2004 for Mac v. 11.2.

In article <siegman-1AF864.09373014092006@news.stanford.edu>,
AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:


No. PNG files are compressed bitmaps very similar to GIF. None of the
original vector information is retained.

--
Rat <ratinox@newsguy.com> \ That and five bucks will get you a
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In article <jshot3-6vb.ln1@peorth.rgo.gweep.net>,
Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@newsguy.com> wrote:


I'm sorry, but I don't believe this is correct.

My understanding (as an admittedly non-expert graphicist) is that the
PNG format was designed to handle both bitmap and vector graphics (as I
believe PICT also does).

And I just now printed one page of one of the received Word.doc
documents to PDF; opened the PDF in Illustrator; deleted all the text
paragraphs; and the remaining diagram was clearly an editable vector
graphic.

In article <siegman-91F6E1.13423514092006@news.stanford.edu>,
AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:


You're welcome not to believe it but that doesn't make it so:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/


Then it is not a PNG image. It is a vector image of some sort.

Rhetorical question: why didn't you try this before posting?

--
Rat <ratinox@newsguy.com> \ That and five bucks will get you a
Minion of Nathan - Nathan says Hi! \ small coffee at Starbucks

In article <siegman-91F6E1.13423514092006@news.stanford.edu>,
AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:


Nope. PNG is raster only, by definition. You need not take my word for
it; the PNG format specification is published online.


Then it was almost certainly a WMF or EMF file.

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Stainless Steel Rat wrote:


I think the issue here is the extraction process. AFAIK, Word doesn't
automatically convert images when you save the document(as long as you
embed it). Meaning, however you're saving it wants to save it as a PNG.
Try choosing "edit image", then tell us what program it opens in (by
default, it would be Photo Editor, which cannot handle vector objects).

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:37:30 -0700, AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote:


They could be WMF , Windows Meta File embedded in a Word document.
"WMF" in google might get you some more info....


Easy to use graphics effects:
http://www.ransen.com/

AES wrote:

Or does you mean the SVG format?

>>>>> AES <siegman@stanford.edu> (A) wrote:


What I do when I have Word or Powerpoint documents is open them, Use the
print menu and choose the preview option (this is on Mac OS X). Or if it is
a large document, I first copy the page with the illustration or only the
illustration to a new document. Now from preview I can save the figure as a
PDF file. If it was a vector drawing in Word or PP, it comes out as a
vector PDF.
I don't know if this also works on other OS than Mac OS X.
--
Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
Private email: piet@vanoostrum.org

AES wrote:


You are incorrect. From "Intro to PNG Features",
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html:

| Like GIF and TIFF, PNG is a raster format, which is to say, it
| represents an image as a two-dimensional array of colored dots
| (pixels). PNG is explicitly not a vector format, i.e., one that can
| store shapes (lines, boxes, ellipses, etc.) and be scaled arbitrarily
| without any loss of quality (generally speaking). For that you
| probably want SVG or PostScript. (There are some private extensions
to
| PNG that add vector information in addition to PNG's regular
| pixels--Macromedia's Fireworks does something along those lines--but
| no valid PNG may omit the pixel data.)



It is very likely that your Word documents contain EMF or WMF
information, or (what is much the same thing) Office drawings embedded
in the Word file (drawn using MS Office's own drawing tools). When
these Word objects are copied to the clipboard, Word offers several
formats for pasting to the receiving application, including:

Picture (Windows Metafile) [i.e. WMF]
MS Office Drawing Object
Picture (Enhanced Metafile) [i.e. EMF]
HTML Format
Picture (GIF)
Picture (PNG)
Picture (JPEG)

Evidently Illustrator is not equipped to receive the WMF or EMF formats
off the clipboard and selects the PNG format instead. (This information
about Word was gleaned from using Word 2003; other versions may vary
but
probably don't, at least as far back as Office 97.)

But when you "printed to PDF", Word either wrote vector Postscript,
which was then converted to PDF by some means, or wrote a vector PDF
directly (again, depending on your Word version). Illustrator had no
trouble reading the vector objects in the PDF and translating them to
Illustrator's internal representation.