Microsoft Word 3-D pie charts with jagged edges

[buckeye]

Customer provided a Word document with 24 pages of 3-D pie charts that have jagged edges. Is there a global setting that can fix them all, do they have to be fixed separately or is this just the nature of the beast for pie charts in Word?

Thanks in advance,

Erik

[Ritter]

I've ran into this before and the solution in unbelievably easy.
A few steps:
1.) Use the Adobe PDF printer, with a good preset (PDF/X for example)
2.) Click The Paper/Quality Tab
3.) Click Advanced
4.) Set Print Quality to "4000dpi"
5.) Create the PDF via Print

I worked with a guy one time who refused to do this and recreated every chart meticulously in Illustrator. What a waste of time.

[buckeye]

Ritter,

Could I possibly send you a test file to see if you can get better results than I am? My Dell computer is running Windows 2000 and my printer options are Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat PDFWriter and CutePDF Writer but no Adobe PDF printer. I used all three with output dpi set to the higher setting but to no avail. I even tried printing from the Mac platform using the PDF/X-1a:2001 format but still no dice. I did see your nice clean pie chart example but did the chart look good before outputting to PDF? I'm having a hard time believing that if it already looks jagged in Word that it will look better upon output.

Thanks,

Erik

[Ritter]

The graph is jagged in word until the PDF conversion. My working assumption is that the graph engine within the MS Office applications does not use very smart vector equations to map the shapes. <sarcasm> I guess maybe the coding behind more refined shapes would be too expensive for such a wealthy company. </sarcasm> . If you open one of the jagged graphs in Illustrator and see how many points and paths there are you begin to see rather than have a shape that requires 2 points and a single path has 6,000. This is why the print engine within MS Office applications reduces the number of points based upon the DPI output setting. If you use 4,000 dpi you get say 1,000 points mapping the shape of the circle rather than 200 at 1200 dpi. You should be warned that the preflight processing and RIP time may increase dramatically with so many vector points to be processed/trapped/ripped.

buckeye,
Check your private messages for my e-mail/contact.