Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 12:34 am Post subject: PDF graphics
Hey Patrick,
I was writing document and found that I could not PDF graphics. At least, they do not show as possible type in the file selector in Insert::Picture::From File
I forget if NeoOffice used to support PDF graphics in 2.2.5 (EPS was in the list in NO3EAP). It would be nice if we could have them because I found the only way to export a graph in vector format from Excel 2008 is as a PDF. That and PDF is a very common format on the Mac.
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org have never been able to insert PDF graphics so that is why you do not see it as an option. The only support for PDF that has been added in NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access is OpenOffice.org's PDF Import extension and that only imports a PDF file into a Draw document.
Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 9:53 am Post subject: Re: PDF graphics
ovvldc wrote:
It would be nice if we could have them because I found the only way to export a graph in vector format from Excel 2008 is as a PDF.
Can you open it in something like OmniGraffle and export back out as EPS? (OmniGraffle being less expensive than Illustrator and one upon a time shipping as bundled software on new Macs....)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 21, 2003 Posts: 173 Location: Selmer, Tennessee
Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 11:55 am Post subject:
Your best bet is to open it in Preview, save as a .PNG or JPG, then drag/drop into Neo.
Alternatively, open in Graphic Converter, crop and doctor it, save as PNG or JPG, then insert into Neo normally. I haven't seen any of the PDF's saved out of excel, but they may be on an 8 1/2 x 11 page size. That'll mean a lot of white space that you don't want, so cropping may be needed. _________________ Jim Plante
MacOS X 10.6.34, MacBook 2GHz C2Duo, 2gb, Neo 3.1.1 p 1
Your best bet is to open it in Preview, save as a .PNG or JPG, then drag/drop into Neo.
Then you end up with either a low-resolution image that won't scale or print well, or a huge file size for the higher resolution....
As an aside, I'm cc'ed (this was about 3-4 years ago) on a couple of the OOo bugs for supporting importing and embedding SVG, and recently there was more ranting about OOo's lack of support for vector formats (EPS turns into a preview image and won't print, at least in apps that don't have Patrick's stellar EPS support; WMF/EMF support is buggy/flaky, as is vector PICT, which the people didn't mention).
To these people, SVG support is the only solution (of course, it's 2009 and we're still waiting on embedding, let alone import/editing ), but it certainly seems to me that support for embedding vector PDF would be a lot more useful in the wider world, since just about every graphics package worth a hill of beans, as well as lots of consumer apps on all platforms, can export PDF
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Oscar, another thought I just had (and one that doesn't require any additional software if it works): if you have an existing image in Excel (or another Office app), does Excel/etc. support selecting that and exporting it as WMF? Assuming your graph doesn't use any of the fancy effects that OOo's WMF importer can't handle, importing and then re-exporting could possibly get you a vector image that Neo could import....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 607 Location: Australia
Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 9:50 pm Post subject: Save Picture
Actually, this thread led me to experimenting with PDF import. You can open PDF's in Draw. The component images of the pdf are available to you there, but when you right-click on one element [image] and try to Save as Picture... it leads to a zero kb file for svg, eps and pdf saves. Png, tiff and jpeg file saves work. In OOo 3.0, I get a non-zero file for eps file saves, but the files can't be opened by graphic converter, preview, inkscape etc.
Oscar, another thought I just had (and one that doesn't require any additional software if it works): if you have an existing image in Excel (or another Office app), does Excel/etc. support selecting that and exporting it as WMF? Assuming your graph doesn't use any of the fancy effects that OOo's WMF importer can't handle, importing and then re-exporting could possibly get you a vector image that Neo could import....
I am using Excel 2008, because the university gave me that for free. If I copy the graph, the only pasting option in NeoOffice is 'bitmap' and if I try to save the graph (by right cliking on it, no menu options for that), I have the choice between JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF and PDF...
In used to be in Excel 2004, that it would copy an EMF or WMF to clipboard and I would use that. But no longer... I may have to reinstall Office 2004 and use it in Rosetta. I hate their new chart interface anyway..
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Where there is a link to xpdf and a dropper for that - xpdf is a freeware command line app that (among other things) converts PDF files into eps - it seems to work fine, the only caveat being that (of course) your PDF doc has to be only one page long - if you want eps of a multipage PDF you'd have to split it up into separate pages first.
The ease with which this works does make me wonder if there's any scope for making this functionality available in NeoOffice somehow as an extension, so that the user could pick up a PDF file to insert as an image, and the extension would convert it into the relevant .eps before inserting? That would be a very cool thing to have, but I don't know how/who .
- padmavyuha
*edit* using a command-line tool like pdftk it's possible to write a script to burst a multipage PDF into multiple PDF files prior to running PDFtoPS on them to get multiple .eps files. Love that command line and it will love you back.
The ease with which this works does make me wonder if there's any scope for making this functionality available in NeoOffice somehow as an extension, so that the user could pick up a PDF file to insert as an image, and the extension would convert it into the relevant .eps before inserting? That would be a very cool thing to have, but I don't know how/who .
Funny though. Mac uses a subset of PDF for its window management, and now I have to convert the image away from that before I can use it..
Best wishes,
Oscar
P.S. I was thinking of using Platypus to make a droplet.. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Droplets are good - I was just thinking it would get the 'drop' on OOo for mac if Neo users could just choose a PDF doc, and then the extension (or whatever) would pop the page or pages into the Neo doc as eps automatically for them. It's a bit of a shame that the PDFtoPS command won't take wildcards as an argument for the file(s) to be converted - you have to hand it a list of space-separated filenames, or call it in a loop.
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. In case you have spare time on the next blue moon.
), but it certainly seems to me that support for embedding vector PDF would be a lot more useful in the wider world, since just about every graphics package worth a hill of beans, as well as lots of consumer apps on all platforms, can export PDF