Monday, September 17, 2007

Trouble with imbeding images...InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc...

I have been having a hard time attempting to make a credit card authorization document for use internally to my company. The main problem is that I want to display our company logo inside the document. This is easy enough for a word file, but I want to turn the word file into a PDF. Here comes the hard part. How do I make the logo appear in sufficiently high quality on the PDF? I tried exporting the logo in several different formats, originally from .ai, and then into other formats uncluding .eps, .jpg etc... The best result I could get was with a PNG file...however even that had problems when displayed in the PDF format...jagged edges on the lines of the logo. It looked acceptable when printed on paper...but still I thought I could do better.

I decided it was time to ditch Microsoft Word and attempt to build the document from something more suited to graphics. Using Adobe Illustrator would take too long and I would have problems with text formatting. I decided to use Adobe Indesign (formally Adobe Pagemaker). I have Adobe CS3 Web Premium installed on my computer, and I figured it would be included....but no. InDesign is not included with CS3 Web Premium. Luckily I had upgraded from CS2 Standard...which included InDesign. Unfortunately, I had uninstalled the entire CS2 suite when I upgraded to CS3. I had to reinstall standalone InDesign from the CS2 suite...which appears to work fine.

Then I was easily able to setup the document using InDesign, and import the logo in vector format, which looks really sharp. Now the problem became that the credit card "placeholders" which were in the original word document were generated with "word art" whatever that means. Even though I could copy and paste them into InDesign, it would not translate them onto the printed or PDF versions of the file. In a quick fix effort to get the project done, I took a screenshot of the word document, imported the card placeholder imaged into Photoshop, tweaked them a bit, and then sent them over to InDesign. Should I decide to spend a bit more time on the project, I will re-do these placeholder images in Illustrator and replace the low-rez ones.

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