Microsoft delighted me several times today.
First I realized that Word 2008 finally lets me place PDF images in Word files, and when I print the document using the OS X “Print to PDF” feature, the placed PDF images are properly embedded as vector images in the final PDF and not as bitmaps. Yessss!!! :-).
I’m not sure but I think this is new in Word 2008 and it’s major news for me. I think EPS also didn’t work in previous versions, they were output as bitmaps. I can now finally place logos and diagrams into my technical documents and have them preserved as high quality vector images in the final output.
This is a page of a Word document with a placed PDF diagram at 2000% magnification in Preview:
Unfortunately it’s still not possible to transform the document’s heading structure into PDF bookmarks, which is essential for long documents.
The second pleasant surprise was the keyboard short cut list for Word 2008 on the Microsoft website. I wanted a hardcopy, but looking at the page’s two-column layout I thought that it would be hard to get a nice printout from that page:
But it turns out that Microsoft thought about that and added a print media CSS stylesheet. It suppresses all of the interactive stuff that’s useless in print, producing in a very printer-friendly page:
Not rocket science, I know, but nice when somebody thinks about it and makes online help so much more useful by using this feature.
Lastly, it appears that Word now notices when I move an open document in the Finder and updates the window title and saves to the new location from that point on. Unless I am mistaken, this is also new in Word 2008.
Maurits: Interesting to hear EPS worked in 2004. Did it require printout on a PostScript printer or output to a PostScript file, or did the direct export to PDF via the OS X print dialog also properly convert the EPS content to vector PDF?
I was also wondering about the compatibility with Windows Word 2007 and tried it yesterday with Microsoft’s optional PDF export plugin for Office 2007. Unfortunately both PDF and EPS images were output as bitmaps at display resolution, really disappointing. It might work better with Adobe’s PDF plugin but I don’t have Acrobat for Windows.
For pure curiosity: why do you favor Word over let's say Pages for technical documentation? And why not TeX?
I used Pages for my only real technical documentation I did, and found it quite comfortable. TeX sounded like a theoretically good thing, but I'm too spoiled for that.
I too am too spoiled for TeX. I’m also too spoiled for the un-Mac-like UI ugliness that is OpenOffice / NeoOffice, for that matter.
Word isn’t perfect, but it’s the best solution on the Mac, and by now I know it well enough to be productive, get the results I want and avoid the problematic parts.
I love Pages, and immediately tried the newest version in iWork 09 to see if I could finally use it for my long, structured technical documents, but unfortunately its paragraph styles are still not powerful enough to create the visual effects I use in my templates.
The missing features are mostly related to paragraph borders and background colors combined with paragraph indents. In Word, a left or right indent also indents the left or right box edge. In Pages, a paragraph indent only shifts the text but the box still uses the full column width. Without borders or background that box is invisible and it doesn’t matter, but with borders or background, the full-width box is visible and looks ridiculous.
Example here:
http://skitch.com/liyanage/bntgf/techdoc-layout-word-vs-pages
Another thing: It seems that Pages paragraph styles cannot be based on other styles, which I think is critical. In Word, I build hierarchies of styles so I can change visual effects in one central place and have them propagate through the styles automatically.
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it *was* actually possible to properly embed EPS files in Word 2004, and this was actually the only way to include production-quality vector graphics in Word (importing EMF, which allowed somewhat hi-quality graphics despite the proprietary format, worked on Windows, but yielded utter garbage on Word for Mac). However, EPS handling was extremely buggy - among other problems, getting proper previews was always a matter of luck. All in all a major source of pain. Good to hear that Word 2008 finally supports PDF. However, I wonder how good cross-platform support is, i.e., are documents with PDFs embedded seamlessly compatible with Windows Word 2007?