I recently had created some letterhead for a client in Adobe InDesign that was to be professionally printed. However, they also needed to be able to create electronic documents with the letterhead converted to PDF from Microsoft Word. It seemed like this should be easy enough to pull off, but it turned out to be an exercise in trial and error. Fortunately, I found a solid solution after many failed attempts.

Logic (which I was foolish to try to apply to anything involving the use of image data in Microsoft Word) told me that my best option would be to export the letterhead from InDesign as a .wmf file, since it’s A) vector-based and B) a Microsoft file format. Then, I should (“should” being the keyword) just be able to Insert>Picture>From File in MS Word with no problems. Unfortunately, the quality of the original vector artwork seems to be affected by this method, and by “affected” I mean “rasterized.” I have since learned that .wmf does not support Bezier curves, which is another reason to avoid exporting from InDesign to a .wmf.
Read the rest of this entry »