I am a Graphic Designer at a print publishing company and I often have client supplied art / layouts made in Word. Technically we aren't supposed to accept Word documents due to all the problems we encounter, but we have to flex on this one to make our clients happy and it always causes headaches for me.
Often, when I open a document, it looks OK in Word - but when I export it to a PDF it goes to absolute garbage - not always, but very often. I've tried opening Word's Advanced options and checking the box that states Word will not compress the image. I've also tried exporting the art to a PDF in every way possible, but it's still REALLY REALLY bad. The settings are supposed to be for print, but they are unacceptable - a screen shot of the Word layout would probably be better.
BUT - If I right click on the image in the file and choose "Save As Picture" I can select a TIFF and the image that was bad before looks GOOD.
Here's an example of exported PDF (top) VS saving the image directly as a TIFF (bottom)
Considering this is OK, I have to imagine the image is actually embedded properly and not just low res or linked to a missing file. My method is usually to export all the images and recreate the layout from scratch in Photoshop, but it's a huge waste of time.
I know that the file I was having problems with today was from and older version of Word. I had saved it and checked the box to preserve compatibility. I recently upgraded to Office 2013 but have always dealt with this issue on a regular basis in older versions of Word too.
I'd just like to export a high-res, print ready, PDF quickly and easily without it becoming unusable garbage. Why is this happening?
