OG to .eps to MS Word - some painfully gained knowledge
 

Problem: trying to put OG pictures exported as .eps into an MS Word 2003 document on Windows sometimes shows a blank box, or a partial preview. The pictures still print correctly, if printed on a PostScript printer.

After much searching around the net, found that versions of Word after 2002 use a different way of handling .eps files than earlier versions, and (surprise!) it doesn't work very well. In earlier versions of Word, previews found as part of the .eps file were used on-screen, at least if they were PICT, DOS Tiff, or perhaps some others. Word 2003 for Windows ignores any previews and tries to generate its own preview, presumably by an embedded PostScript interpreter. This embedded interpreter seems to be limited - when it encounters a font it doesn't know, it stops interpreting altogether. It also seems to quit when it encounters a "Rectangle" or "pdfImport" object generated by OG. When the interpreter gives up, the on-screen result is an empty or partially empty box.

The part of the problem that's due to fonts can be overcome by the use of the open-source [B]pstoedit[/B] tool, which uses ghostscript to change text into shapes. This can be downloaded and compiled from DarwinPorts, I think, or it can be installed on the Windows machine as part of gsview. For example, if OG has exported to the file pic.eps the command line
[CODE]pstoedit -f gs:epswrite pic.eps newPic.eps[/CODE] will convert unknown fonts into shapes. The newPic.eps file can then be inserted into MS Word and will show an on-screen preview. Using the gsview tool on Windows with Edit -> Convert to vector format... does the same processing.

I haven't figured out how to do a conversion that fixes problems with "Rectangle" and "pdfImport" shapes yet, though there are probably some parameters to pstoedit that will work. With the proper libraries installed (libEMF at least) pstoedit can convert to .emf files which Word accepts without any problems, although I don't know how accurate the results are.

I hope this helps someone out - it's been a moderately difficult search to get this to work at all. It would be nice if OG incorporated a workflow that encompassed this - if I get one working I'll post it.