GIFJPGPNG

Conclusion (Pdf)

1. Use PNG to publish screenshots, a little bit bigger but it will work as you expect, i.e. no resizing.
2. Word behaves strange with JPG:s resizing them when publishing.
3. Picture tools in Word are good enough, no need for a special program.
4. Use Paint for a first preliminary cut, then size or crop inside Word. Avoid sizing if not needed – you will loose in sharpness!
5. Avoid frames in Word they are costly in size and degrade picture sharpness. Frame with CSS.
6. Compress option not worth trouble?
7. The names given by Word is strange but logical and types are kept at least if no modifications.
8. Be careful when moving around pictures after first publish… Word seems to mess them up sometimes!
9. Word's nice tables look great and not too ugly in published HTML, have a look!

What happens with my picture when publishing?

I just thought I have understood how to handle pictures when using Word 2007 as my blog client..

But something happens that I don't understand!

It is always like this!! I took a screenshot with Alt/Prnt Scrn and then opened Paint and pasted it. I cut out the peace I wanted and opened a new picture in Paint and pasted it back with roughly the correct picture size that I wanted to show. Then I saved it as PNG, GIF and JPG with paint. Looking at the pictures files at the hard disk with Windows Explorer they have the following properties: before and after publishing:

File	Pixels local HD	Size local HD	Pixels FTP-site	Size on FTP-site	File type FTP-site
GIF	601x267	28613	605x271	28233	GIF
JPG	601x267	24216	755x338	31437	JPG
PNG	601x267	33194	605x271	37441	PNG

       

I publish to my account on Wordpress with the picture setting to my own FTP-site and it all look great in Word, i.e. the JPG is in the size it was on my hard disk, but when looking at my publish post on Wordpress the JPG is in greater size than in Word. One could wonder why?? In the samples below you see the same screenshot saved under a different formats. I had made up my mind to skip GIF:s because they lose too much of the gradients built into Office 2007 as could be seen. I thought it would be smart to have a look on whether choosing JPG or PNG for screenshots and then this happens. In one way or the other this made my choice very simple, since Word destroys my JPG:s by resizing then I have to choose PNG, which seems to be best quality but with rather high impact on file size.

Another way around could be to let Word publish on my FTP-site and then renaming and copy the correct files manually to my FTP-site, but being lazy….

       

GIF (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF3.gif)

GIF size 606x271, 18k.

     

JPG (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF4.jpg)

JPG, resized by Word!! Why?? To 755x338 and 31k.

     

PNG (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF5.png)

PNG 601x267 -> 605x271 (invisible fram, or??) 33k->37k.

     

Now let us see if we could have any benefits from all the new picture modifications built into Word 2007. The content area in my CSS used at Wordpress is set to 510px, which means that all pictures above got truncated when shown in the blog. We start with adding a border to make the screenshot more precise. Then we will try to resize the picture to get it to fit into 510px. I will also try to crop it with the cropping tool, and then I will test to use compress to save file size when publishing.

PNG with border in gray. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF6.png)

Done with 'Picture Tools','Picture Border' choosing 50% black. What happens is a little bit strange, the picture gets dimmed and the sharpness seems to be lost in the picture shown in Word.

     

Size by 84%. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF7.png )

With 'Picture Tools', 'Size' I make it to be 84% of original size, 605px -> 510px is about 84%.

     

Cropped only.( 032607_2103_JPPNGGIF8.png )

With 'Picture Tools', 'Crop' I make it 13,34 cm (5.25" for 'inci-people') wide and cut off some of the under part. Exatly the same width I have got on my printout from Wordpress!! I am impessed!

     

Sized and compressed. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF9.png )

This one is sized to 80% and then compressed with these options set. -6%! Not impressed!!

     

     

Cropped and compressed. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF12.png)

Cropped to same size but also compressed with the options above.

     

Publishing the pictures after modification and then copying them back to my local HD gives the following result:

Let summaries these figures, you have to excuse my computer is talking Swedish. Headings in the picture above are Name, Size, Type, Changed and Pixels.

Pic		Picture		Sizechange	Comment
5		PNG origin		=	+16% than JPG
6		Gray Border		+65%	Costly!!
7		Size 84%		+40%	Fewer pixels but bigger!!
8		Cropped		-29%	-63% in pixels!!
9		Size & Compress		-6%	Compress, not worth it!
12		Cropped & compress		+4%	As above!

Let us look into the docx-file of the saved document to see how the pictures are stored there, it is done by renaming the docx-file to zip, and then 'Exploring' gives:

Some pictures seem to be missing in the saved document?? (Only 9 out of 12??) No clue about what has happened. Feel free to investigate and tell the World more about these pictures and you picture of Word 2007! Send me a post and I'll post it!!