Jürgen Welz
jwelz at hotmail.com
Wed Dec 21 17:02:52 CST 2005
I've got my graphic logos going into document body and headers and tables in multiple kinds of footers with good control of size and placement. I've also tried a WMF capable graphics program, to wit, Corel's Paint Shop Pro X. After cleaning up the TIF files (letters vary in height by 2 or 3 pixels in 150 and don't line up on bottoms) and converting to 2 color (logos are two color, but the graphic has 85 interpolated 'smoothed' colors at some edges, of course on curves, but also on straight horizontal lines) before converting back to 16 bit and then filling with our target color, the WMF file save menu offers the option of saving with or without vector data. I was hoping for purely vector data. The resulting files were over 90% of the size of the TIF originals; huge. Resizing down to the 1700 bytes of our current WMF's left them as blurry vague messes. The existing WMFs are far superior, though not adequte in my opinion, and slightly off color. Clearly I need a better Graphics program. I believe I have an old copy of Corel 4 kicking around, but I'm not sure whether it will support a vector format I can use in my forms/reports/documents. I had a look at a downloadable Font editor program and the trial version does a nice job of converting a graphic file to a pure vector scalable font, though I haven't figured out the kerning well enough to do an accurate facsimiile of the required logo, I can duplicate the characters exactly. There is also a stylized black line that looks a bit like the Nike 'Swoop' that becomes a purely horizontal line below the primary corporate names. I believe I can make the start of the swoop by converting a left paranthesis character with a fair bit of descender and tie into a horizontal line or running into a line of '_' characters set to display at the top of the line below (by moving the line to the top of the font). By Italicizing or setting enough kerning, I can get the top of the 'Swoop' over the first character as required (all logo text has about a 7 degree italic slope). This should get me a 'graphic' file size of a few dozen bytes rather than the multiple K file sizes we now have for logos. Does anyone know whether emailed PDF conversions will keep the logo intact for systems that do not have the custom font I am considering? Does a copy of the font get sent with the file? I really only need to define a maximum of 8 characters for the current companies. (Divisions have a 50% Grey Arial Italic Bold font added after one of the primary Logo company and some have 'A Joint Venture' starting from the end of the 'Swoop'. Those variations of the main logos can all simply be set up by adding text of the Arial font and perhaps overlaying a transparent text box to fine tune the height of the added 'A Joint Venture', or perhaps revising a font to be samll enough, yet in the upper portion of the character space. Anyone with some suggestions? Other options? Ciao Jürgen Welz Edmonton, Alberta jwelz at hotmail.com