[Sea-sa] Importing diagrams from PPT to Word

Tue Apr 17 14:18:19 UTC 2018

Dear sea-sa members,

It is not necessary to use a 3rd party tool to get scalable graphics.  The guidelines that have worked for me are:

·         If Visio is used to create diagrams, create a separate “sheet” for each diagram within the same Visio file, and label each by figure number.  It makes for a clean delivery package to the Secretariat.

·         The same principle applies if using Powerpoint:  separate slide for each diagram, labelled by figure number.

·         DON’T paste images into Word as editable embedded (Powerpoint, Visio, etc.) objects.  This makes the document grow uncontrollably large and Word becomes (even more) prone to erratic behavior.

·         DON’T paste images into Word as bitmap objects.  These are nearly unreadable when resized or printed.

·         DO paste images into Word using “Paste Special…” and select “Enhanced Metafile”.  This format scales very well.

·         DO paste images into Word using “Paste Special…” and select PNG.  PNG also scales well.

·         JPEG can be used too, but it is a lossy format and sometimes introduces visible artifacts into the image for no obvious reason.

If e.g. UML tools offer a selection of formats for file export, PNG is likely the best choice.  Save directly into a graphics image format if possible.  Export to PDF can be used if necessary, but since graphics are themselves embedded objects in PDF, copy/paste from PDF into Word is slower and more cumbersome.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Craig Biggerstaff
Senior Engineer Specialist, Mission Systems Operations Contract
+1 281 483 2027
craig.biggerstaff at nasa.gov<mailto:craig.biggerstaff at nasa.gov>

From: SEA-SA <sea-sa-bounces at mailman.ccsds.org> On Behalf Of Roger Thompson
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 4:25 AM
To: Shames, Peter M (JPL-312B)[Jet Propulsion Laboratory] <peter.m.shames at jpl.nasa.gov>; 'SEA-SA' <sea-sa at mailman.ccsds.org>
Cc: mario.merri at esa.int
Subject: Re: [Sea-sa] Importing diagrams from PPT to Word

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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