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December 6, 2018
Question

Trouble converting pdf into word document (for a letterhead)

  • December 6, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 2814 views

Hi,

I'm not sure this is the most appropriate place for my quandary, still, I'm hoping someone might have some illuminating tips?

I've been asked to put together a letterhead for a law firm, so far so good, the firm will primarily be using Word for their correspondence, so I need to create a word document template that contains the letterhead design. And I'm having a real hard time of it.

I've saved the letterhead as a 300dpi jpg and inserted it into the Word doc and it looks... awful. One blog suggested that even though it looks blurry on screen it will actually print "crisp" - that may be so, but probably the firm will use the word doc digitally too so it needs to look good on screen.

Help

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    2 replies

    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    December 6, 2018

    Phoe,

    Why use lossy JPEG (which may be in less than Maximum quality) instead of more crisp/clear oriented PNG24, or even better one of the vector formats that is understood by Word, such as PDF (as I understand newer Word versions can handle, said by someone that never had it) or WMF or EMF? And you may consider SVG at least for web use.

    If you must use a raster format for some (or no) reason, (in the possibly specific version) for screen use it should have the exact pixel x pixel size at which it is displayed/used.

    And have you used the optimization option(s)?

    PhoePhoeAuthor
    Known Participant
    December 10, 2018

    Thanks for your reply Jacob, yes, it's tricky because I don't use Word

    regularly so my version is slightly older (14.7.7) and I think the latest

    Word is 16.something and perhaps the opening PDF's in word without

    formatting issues has been resolved in newer versions, it's hard to tell

    without the latest version.

    I think my client has the latest version of Word because they say they have

    been able to open the PDF but seemingly are unable to edit it/ write over

    it for correspondence.

    The reason I was using a high res Jpeg was because I found a youtube

    tutorial who used Jpeg without issue, though you're quite right PNG24 could

    work as well or better, it is optimised.

    I am surprised at how tricky this has proven, kinda hate Word right now.

    jane-e
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    December 11, 2018

    PhoePhoe  wrote

    I think my client has the latest version of Word because they say they have

    been able to open the PDF but seemingly are unable to edit it/ write over

    it for correspondence.

    I am surprised at how tricky this has proven, kinda hate Word right now.

    • If all you have is the letterhead that you showed us, they need to put it into the Header area of Word so they can type on top of it. In Acrobat, convert it to an image with File > Export > Image and choose tiff or jpeg. The default for jpeg is Medium. Click Settings and change it to Maximum since you have bad quality with medium.
    • Right click the image in the header and set the text wrap to behind text.

    • If, instead, it needs to be converted to text, then inside of Acrobat, choose File  > Export to > MS Word. Select the file, then click the Settings button to either make it flowable or to retain the format (put it in frames). Still put it in the Header in Word.
    Monika Gause
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    December 6, 2018

    Difficult to say without seeing "awful"

    Which version of Word are they using? Won't a PDF work as well?

    PhoePhoeAuthor
    Known Participant
    December 6, 2018

    I have an older version of Word on my computer (I don't use it) - version 14.7.7

    Do newer versions allow you to open PDF's?