Word X and ChemDraw PostScript files: a follow-up

Following up on yesterday's item on "Word X and ChemDraw PostScript files," we have several replies:

Christopher Foote writes: "Is the poster using the OS X version of ChemDraw? I have never had this problem (but I always paste in the figures, not inserting them from the menu). However, another problem I have had for several years, not fixed in the OS X version of Office, is that Word or PowerPoint files with pasted ChemDraw files get damaged when they are moved from Windows machines to the Mac (and I think, vice versa). The embedded files can't be edited in ChemDraw any more, either. The work-around is to repaste the drawings, since the .cdx files themselves are cross-platform. The publishers of ChemDraw say it's because Office doesn't treat their embedded PostScript properly."

Jeremy Reichman adds: "I discovered that I could not create full-quality PDF files using Word v. X documents with embedded EPS files. This sounds a lot like the issue you noted with ChemDraw. Specifically, I embed an EPS file generated from an OmniGraffle 2.02 document in Word v. X (with the URL Security patch applied). The EPS has a blank, generic preview in Word. The same blank preview is displayed when I print to PDF (using the built-in Mac OS X function). If I create a PostScript file from the same Word document and run it through Adobe Acrobat Distiller 4 in Mac OS 9, the EPS file renders properly as a graphic rather than a blank placeholder. I wonder if the same holds true for the ChemDraw graphics placed in Word v. X documents. I also noticed that the PostScript files generated from Word 2001 on OS 9 were often much smaller than the ones from Word v. X on OS X. In some cases, I was able to distill OS 9 PostScript files where OS X PostScript files failed with errors."

Note: We have previously reported a similar issue involving printing EPS files from FileMaker Pro: "EPS files appear to contain only their screen preview, but not the embedded EPS info."

Update: Microsoft has followed up on this matter and replies: "The Cambridge people were talking about a different issue altogether. Further, the issue about printing EPS images is mostly fixed in our upcoming SR-1."