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I am inserting figures in pdf format in my Word document.

After some time, Word inevitably rasterizes the largest figures. They appear pixellated. There must be some sort of threshold around 500 kb where Word takes the iniative to convert, as it does not happen with my smaller figures.

  • Might not apply because I am not technically inserting an image; but Do not compress images in file is ticked ON, as shown in the screenshot below.

  • It is not a viewing setting, if I export the entire document to .pdf, I can see which figures are rasterized and which ones are still vectorised.

  • The issue does not seem to be at the exporting to pdf stage. The smaller figures do not get compressed, and look perfect before and after saving to pdf.

  • I am not doing any cropping or editing of the figure within Word. Just dragged-and-dropped the pdf.

If I replace all my figures and save to .pdf directly without saving or closing the file, it's perfectly fine. The resulting pdf is not even that massive. So definitely Word can do this, but I need to make it stop rasterizing images.

Can you help?

(it's probably a similar issue as Word is compressing images even though "Do not compress images in file" is selected - why? but the answer does not work for me)

enter image description here

francoiskroll
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  • What do you mean by "inserting large images as .pdf"? – harrymc Dec 16 '21 at 17:43
  • I create a figure in Adobe Illustrator, save it as pdf, drag-and-drop it in my Word document. Is this what you are asking? – francoiskroll Dec 16 '21 at 17:51
  • Why don't you insert it as an image? The setting you mention is for images. – harrymc Dec 16 '21 at 18:15
  • FYI: downsampling is **not** compression (one might make an argument that it could be seen as a form of compression, but this is a dialog option in software). When an image "appears pixelated" after placement, this is a good indicator that the image has been either downsampled or placed larger than appropriate for the pixels in the image. – Yorik Dec 16 '21 at 18:30
  • @harrymc inserting the images as pdfs seems to keep the file size low, versus inserting high-res pngs. I appreciate the suggestion; but Word is perfectly okay with it for about 20 minutes, so it can be done. How do I force Word to keep them vectorised permanently though? – francoiskroll Dec 16 '21 at 18:37
  • https://superuser.com/search?q=Word+compress+pdf – spikey_richie Dec 16 '21 at 19:08
  • I went through these questions. It is of course possible I have missed a relevant one. You are very welcome to point it to me in that case. – francoiskroll Dec 16 '21 at 19:14
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    Not what you're waiting for, so this is a comment rather than an answer: I've worked with vector images in PDF, and they work beautifully. However, you're inserting a PDF inside a PDF. As it's pixelated, it's clear that this embedded PDF has been converted to a raster image, likely as a space optimization, meaning that "Do not compress images in file" does not apply for an embedded PDF. I would suggest again to insert the images as images, not as PDF. – harrymc Dec 16 '21 at 20:18
  • Thanks. I understand the confusion, I've edited my question to make it clearer. I still believe it's a useful question, especially as Word is clearly able to do it. I have just replaced all my figures/exported the document to pdf and the result looks perfect, but as soon as I'll close the doc and open it again, the same 10 or so figures will be rasterized. – francoiskroll Dec 16 '21 at 21:00

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If any helpful, I think my situation was somewhat improved by turning OFF some auto-save settings in Word > Preferences > Save, especially Save auto-recovery information (see screenshot below). I think this was the setting responsible for rasterizing the heavier figures automatically after 20 minutes or so. The figures will still get rasterized when closing the document or saving but at least I can replace all the figures and export my document to pdf without a countdown.

Disclaimer: as you can imagine this makes it riskier to lose some work if you don't have the habit of regularly saving manually!

enter image description here

francoiskroll
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