As far as I know Word doesn’t support transparency in images. There are only a handful of formats that does support transparency and I don’t believe that are will work in word (you can use them, but won’t get transparency). The file formats are EPS (using a clipping path), TIF (with or without a clipping path, most programs haven’t been updated to work without a clipping path), GIF (poor quality in general especially for anything photo like) and PNG (not well supported by most programs, especially things from Microsoft).
The only work around would be to load the logo/text in to Photoshop and then put the colored blocks behind it and then save the entire thing as a TIF or whatever and forget about transparency.
Robert
I disagree with your assessment of PNG files. I use them in PowerPoint when I need the transparent background and the seem to work well.
Bob
Thanks very much for your quick response! But hmmm… we were afraid of that. I was trying to avoid having the color blocks as part of the jpg or tif because the color (yellow and green) comes out so wacko. Is there any way to make a GIF with slightly better resolution? like blowing it up in photoshop and crisping the edges or something? Even if it were painstaking, if we could make one version, we could use it on everything…
As Bob said, PNG files are your best bet for transparency in Word/Office documents.
Okay, we tried making a version as a PNG. It does seem to be a little sharper than the GIF. Do you know, are there any settings in Photoshop that will help smooth and crispen the edges of the letters after we import the file into Word? We did a cursory test file of Sharp/Crisp/Strong/Smooth, but once the doc is in Word, they pretty much look the same. (and thanks again for your help with this)
We currently have a GIF file, but the resolution seems too low; the edges of the letters are ragged, and the raggedness increases even more with a PDF file.
The problem is not with the GIF resolution but rather the edges of the text are not blending with the colour it’s sitting on. Photoshop always produces a slight blending of colours where 2 colours meet (anti-aliasing).
When creating images with transparency for the Web one usually assigns a colour to the Matte. When you ‘Save for Web’->’GIF’->’Transparency on’, set the ‘Matte’ colour to the background colour that the text will sit on. The jagged edges will disappear. Photoshop will produce a small blend between the text colour and the intended background colour when creating the GIF.
Problem is you might not know what colour you’ll be placing the text on. If you set it to Magenta then a slight magenta glow will appear when the text is placed over a white area (or any other colour other then Magenta for that matter).
If you know the various colours your text will sit on then the job would be easier. Thus you’d have one version for blue backgrounds, one for yellow, green, red etc.. That’s the only way I know of to smooth the edges of text with transparent backgrounds.
Russell
Thanks, Russell, that makes sense and explains the ragged edge. Unfortunately, the letters will span different colors, like the upper half of the name on a gold square but the lower half of the letters on white or green.
GIF’s are limited to 256 colors so it would depend on the subject. As for crisp edges since transparency in GIF is either on or off I don’t think you can get much more "crisp" than that. Getting GIF to work is just going to depend on the subject. Photos with thousands of colors don’t do well. A logo with 2 or 3 dozen colors I would think would be fine. The problem is the hard edges. I don’t think they will very pretty.
Robert
I never use Word, but just for fun, I created a 4" × 5", 300 ppi fake logo in Photoshop. It used a couple highly contrasting colors (approximately: grass green and and a dark lavender) with bold black text, all created on a transparent layer with no Background.
I converted it to sRGB profile, then did a SFW using PNG-24.
I created 6 colored boxes in a Word document and filled them with common bond office paper colorsgreen, canary, goldenrod, blue, light gray, and I left one of them white.
I plopped the PNG logo I created into each box, resized them to fit, and they look perfect, with no colored fringing. The only edge anomalies were due to the way Word displays images.
No, I didn’t bother trying to print them. I’m sure they’d look OK (well, as good as they could look coming from an inkjet and being printed onto colored paper, anyway.)
Try it.
Thanks, all of you, for all your help. We’ve got some great alternatives to try out over the next few days. So far, the PNG looks better than the GIF in terms of the pixellated edges. Another friend of a friend suggested creating the original in a vector-based program (we do have Adobe InDesign) and then "converting the text into curves" and then exporting it as a transparency to Photoshop, and then saving as a gif or png. (We’re just using black and white text, no colors, that we’ll float over other colors and pictures. ) Does anyone have experience converting text into curves?
Love the fake logo! when I print it, it does have a slight pixellated edge though. Could it be different printers have different results? Hmmm… (We have a Tektronix Xerox Laser 7700 color printer.) Since we’re a small company and often using this for proposals, which are essentially interviews on paper, we’re trying to get as professional (and impressive) a look as we can, if it’s possible, without having to spend big bucks for an outside graphics person every time we want to tweak something. We also would prefer not to use Word, but alas our team companies and clients require it…
If you use a .png image with transparency, do the following. Select the picture.
Format>Picture, select the Format tab.
You will see five wrapping styles. Click the In Front of Text button. Click OK
You can now move your .png graphic over any text in your Word document and see what is underneath the transparent area..
At least it works for me in Word 2003.
Gordo
<Bob Levine> wrote in message
I disagree with your assessment of PNG files. I use them in PowerPoint when I need the transparent background and the seem to work well.
Bob
Hi there,
Word 2003 will place a tiff image with a transparent or solid colour background on top of text or coloured shapes. Here’s an example. The yellow flower is on a solid blue background and placed in word 2003 onto a red filled rectangle.
You may have to set the wrapping options or define the colur of the background to be transparent in word using the tranparency tool in the Picture Too Bar.
Hope this helps.
I think the answers may revolve around: PNG, scaling and export.
If one chooses to use a pixel based program than the better option is to export the pixel based image in the size and resolution you need.
A vector based object (assuming all of the properties will carry over) will scale easier or should do as it is vector based.
Whatever approach one chooses it seems that Export will be important in the sense of what export format should be used for vector based apps and what resolution may be important from a pixel based app.
i think you need an imaging program that can help you insert image to word document and also it is able to change the transparency, size and resolution.
