[Sea-sa] Importing diagrams from PPT to Word

[Shames, Peter M (312B)]

Roger,

I did talk to Tom about this.  The CCSDS publication RQ are driven by a desire to produce high quality docs that print well, view well, and are portable.

Most of the MS specific stuff fails the portability test.  All of the bitmapped options fail the quality and scalability test.  SVG and PDF native, not bitmapped, options work fine.

I tend to use PDF myself, but agree that JPG is usually more convenient.  It would be ok with me, for document draft purposes, if we all use JPG for now.  As long as we give Tom the source files we should be OK.  I’ll send him an early draft and make sure he is ok with that.

Cheers, Peter


Sent from Peter's JPL iPhone 7

Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler.

~Albert Einstein

On Apr 17, 2018, at 5:25 AM, Roger Thompson <roger.rocketbrain at btinternet.com<mailto:roger.rocketbrain at btinternet.com>> wrote:

Hi Peter,

Where has this requirement come from and can Tom propose an efficient process for achieving this?

Is this something Tom does for us when processing the books for publication, given the source graphics file, or is it something the authors themselves are supposed to do?

Few tools have native support for svg, while other graphics formats are widely supported.  The MS Office tools would appear to support jpeg, gif, png, as well as some Microsoft proprietary formats, but not svg.  I suspect the situation for UML tools will be worse than for the Office suite.  In my view we should be allowing the use of a widely supported generic format, such as jpeg.  I do not know of an efficient means of generating svg from powerpoint using the tools I have at my disposal.

As it stands, we have in excess of 70 figures to include in our green book.  Mine (50 or so) are all sourced in Powerpoint.  To import a JPEG to Word from Powerpoint takes about a minute per diagram (so <1hr for all of my diagrams) – this is not a one-off task, as diagrams continue to be updated.  This method also allows you to select the portion of the powerpoint slide to be included (typically not the Slide header and footer).  If instead we have to use a 3rd party tool to generate an SVG file, import that and crop to the diagram itself, I would estimate this could take 10-15 minutes per diagram (1-1½ days for a full update of 50 diagrams.  Given the budget available for this task, this seems excessive and not a useful way of spending limited resources.

Cheers,

Roger

From: SEA-SA [mailto:sea-sa-bounces at mailman.ccsds.org] On Behalf Of Shames, Peter M (312B)
Sent: 13 April 2018 16:05
To: SEA-SA
Subject: [Sea-sa] Importing diagrams from PPT to Word

Hi Guys,

I just asked Tom Gannett, the CCSDS Chief Technical Editor, about his recommendation for handling diagrams in Word docs.  His concise statement is "scalable vector graphics".  This does translate into SVG, but PDF in vector graphics mode (not bitmap) also works.  JPG, bitmap, PICT, etc are not acceptable.

So I recommend using PDF vector images to import graphics from PPT (or other sources) into our Word doc.

In any event expect to provide the source files for all figures, regardless of the tool you use to produce it.

Thanks, Peter

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