Extracting embedded graphics from a Microsoft Word document for use in FrameMaker.

This might be of use to people trying to extract embedded graphics from Microsoft Word.

I came in on a project in which some very graphic intensive (and huge!) Word documents were being converted to FrameMaker. Since you cannot copy and paste graphics from Word to FrameMaker without compromising the bit depth, the procedure used to extract the graphics was to take screenshots of the images and save them as separate files. I found this to be less than ideal because it added a lot of unnecessary work and furthermore restricted the image resolution to the the screen resolution (which in many cases brought down the resolution significantly).

A much painless approach to extracting graphics from a Word document is as follows:

1. Open the document in Word.
2. Choose File>Save as Webpage. The Save As dialog displays.
3. In the "Save As Type" dropdown menu, choose Web Page (*.htm, *.html)
4. Click Save. Ignore format error warnings.

Word will convert the document to HTML and in doing so will create a folder for all the embedded graphics which will be at the original resolution regardless of how they were scaled in Word. The folder will also contain thumbnails of all the graphics (amongst other related XML files) which will be significantly smaller files--make sure you delete these if you don't need them. I then created an images folder to reference them in the FrameMaker document.

A word of caution! If you delete the HTML file, the folder containing the graphics will also be deleted. I don't know if this the most efficient way but it cut down on the amount of work involved significantly.