Word version of Letterhead,

[kdprinter]

I need help.

I know nothing about word.

A new client that we did a 2 color Letterhead in InDesign and printed wants his Letterhead in Word Format.

I tried something - PDF, exporting and nothing seems to work.

His exact words - the information at the bottom of the page cannot be kept there in order to accomplish what we need so be it but it done quickly if possible.

Can someone help or advise me?

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Export the letterhead design as a PDF, then place it as a background in MS Word. There are several youtube videos available showing step by step instructions.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, this only works if the PDF file is placed as a background in the MacOS version of Word and the subsequent use of the Word document is used in Word only under MacOS.

Except for MacOS use of Microsoft Office products, which for better or worse is a miniscule fraction of overall Office use, PDF is not natively supported.

A PDF placed as a background in MacOS version of Word is placed both as PDF and a low resolution (i.e., fuzzy-wuzzy) RGB raster image flavor of Microsoft's EMF format. When opened in Windows, all that is used is that EMF copy of the background with the obvious unacceptable results.

I do have an alternative that has proven to work very effectively, though.

• Export PDF/X-4 from InDesign.
• Open the resultant PDF file in Acrobat Pro DC.
• Use the fixup to convert all text to outlines (yes, this can terribly small point size type, but it is better than fuzzy-wuzzy low resolution raster).
• Save the PDF file.
• Create a new non-color managed CMYK Adobe Illustrator document and place (not open) the PDF file into the Illustrator document. Adjust content location and artboard size as appropriate.
• From Illustrator use File=>Export=>Export As and use the EMF file format.
• Close Illustrator.
• Open up the desired Word document and import the EMF file you created from Illustrator, placing as desired for a background without the “washout” option.

You made need to fool around with the original document size and possibly some fake white lines given that Word seems to do its own thing in terms of its percentage for placement.

Alternatively, you can simply insert the .EMF file into a Word document as a normal image, again adjusting to suit.

I have found that this works fairly well once you get the hang of it (and how Word scales EMF despite what you may ask for).

Note that this method does not work particularly well for complex graphics and/or graphics with small type for which outlining plays havoc. (Although EMF does support text, it doesn't support font embedding and a letterhead missing fonts, oy!).

          - Dov

[BobLevine]

Dov, is there a reason you’d go with EMF over WMF?

[Dov Isaacs]

I am not a WMF/EMF expert. I avoid both like the plague unless I have an emergency, but …

EMF is/was Microsoft's next generation of WMF. Any and all bug fixes, enhancements, etc. are done for EMF as opposed to WMF. And EMF has more “features” than WMF, i.e. EMF is a superset of WMF and exporting an Illustrator document to EMF is more likely to end up with something somewhat renderable in Office documents than WMF.

          - Dov

[BobLevine]

Thanks, Dov.

I have one client that needs WMFs for logos that go into Word templates. Illustrator can’t do it so I still keep CorelDRAW around.

[Dov Isaacs]

Interesting. Anything Word can do with WMF it can do with EMF. Your client probably just doesn't know that. Maybe time for some education?!?

          - Dov

[BobLevine]

I haven’t done anything in a while but they use an automated system. It’s a huge corporation and they have 100’s of these logos in different sizes and colors.

They give me EPS files and Illustrator can’t handle the curves; CD will create a file with hundreds of line segments to make it look like a curve.

They pay me to do this so educating them would be counter-productive.

[Dov Isaacs]

Understood.

BTW, I think that EMF solves at least part of the curve-in-hundreds-of-lines problem!

          - Dov

[BobLevine]

Without seeing the actual letterhead it’s impossible to answer. If it’s a simple header and footer I suppose they could be rasterized and placed in the header and footer of the Word file.

[Colin Flashman]

In my experience, fulfilling this type of request (e.g. client wants their letterhead in word) ultimately ends up with some kind of scope creep, because once the file has been sent, there are then issues such as:

• I can't print to the edge (the original letterhead may have had art going to the trim edges);
• It's blurry (because the original art was rendered and saved as a raster file);
• The file size is huge;
• I now want it to do something else I didn't originally ask for...

In short, I don't fulfil these requests for clients, but instead have a conversation to explain the difficulty of the task. Sure, it's frustrating, but nowhere near as frustrating as preparing file after file that doesn't meet the client's expectations.

There's another thread on this topic that is worth having a look at - can i create letterhead for a word template in indesign?

There's also this topic about placing a PDF into a word file - Re: PDF is blurry when inserted into Word document

[Scott Falkner]

I have had to do this from time to time. I would rasterize the letterhead in Photoshop at 600ppi in RGB mode with antialiasing off. I crop out different areas and save them as separate PNG images. Say there’s a logo and company name at the top and a coloured bar r an address at th bottom. I would save that as two separate images. Import them into the Word file’s header and position exactly. Proof by exporting a PDF and placing in your Indesign file to compare to the original.

[JonathanArias]

Learning how to do this from word literally takes 5 minutes. It’s not difficul, do you have lynda.com?

i learned it and it’s way easier than indesign