Copying equations from Mathcad 15 and pasting in word document

[rdelascasas]

I have copied and pasting equations from Mathcad 15 to paste in Word document. The word document will be edited to be part of a book.

the Editor told me that the quality of the equations was not good, that only had 96 dpi of resolution (I do not know what this mean). But for print, the quality of the equation, as seeing in the word document, has to be 300 dpi.

Does anyone have idea how I can improve the quality of copying and pasting equations in word documents?

thank you in advance,

Rogelio

[LucMeekes]

'dpi' means 'dots per inch'. it is a measure of how many picture-points (pixels, or dots) there are on one inch of length. If you have a pciture of 100 dpi, and it is one inch wide and one inch high, the picture consists of 100x100=10 000 picture points. 96 dpi is a common number for screen resolution.

I find I get the best resolution when I copy 2 or more Mathcad regions (so select two or more regions in mathcad and select 'copy' from the menu, or press [CTRL-C]').

Then in MsWord I use 'paste special' with the option 'Picture (Windows Metafile)'.

See attached MsWord file, if you zoom in to 200 % you can see the difference in resolution.

Success!
Luc

[rdelascasas]

thank you very much Luc.

I will try this option. I will keep you posted with the outcome from the publisher editor.

regards,

Rogelio

[MikeArmstrong]

You could always try the screenshot feature in Word - 'Insert tab, Screenshot' and select the Mathcad window. The window can then be clipped and resized.

Mike

[LucMeekes]

That gives a picture with the screen resolution (72 or 96 dpi usually).

Luc

[MikeArmstrong]

Thanks Luc,

I also regularly use this method for inserting sketches directly from AutoCAD and have found it to be the easiest solution.

Mike

[rdelascasas]

The copy and paste process is very straight forward, the problem that I am having is that so far, the options that I have tried do not have the high resolution that is required for the formulas, based on the company that is going to print the book. I need to get a dpi of 300, so far I have obtained 90.

any help with this?

thank you in advance,

Rogelio

[MikeArmstrong]

Have you tried copying the formulas into Irfanview (freeware)?

1. Load your image into Irfanview.
2. Select the "Image > Resize/Resample" option.
3. In that dialog window you'll see a specific DPI data box.
4. Simply enter whatever DPI you want without adjusting anything else in that dialog window.
5. Click on the "OK" button.

Mike

[LucMeekes]

You cannot (in general) create resolution that isn't there to start with.

Yes. You can load a bitmap into a picture app (IrfanView, PaintShopPro, the Gimp... you name it) and artificially boost its apparent resolution. But it will not get the sharpness of a picture with a (much) higher resolution AND remain presentable. (That is: you can use filters to enhance sharpness, but then you will lose presentation quality.) Or you actually get a higher resolution, but your picture has become smaller by the same amount.

In theory you could zoom in, within Mathcad, on the Mathcad sheet, to get more pixels on screen. Then take a screenshot, and with a picture app reduce the actual size of the picture while maintaining the amount of pixels. Thus you could get more pixels per unit of length = a higher dpi. But there is a much better way.

See attached Mathcad file, and the .pdf I created from it, detailing how I did it. Fig 2 is what you get when you just copy, and paste to a bitmap picture.

What I hope to show here is that it should be fairly easy, and not require more than Mathcad, MsWord and Windows to create a presentable, and high quality printable MsWord document with Mathcad stuff. Fig 3 shows a picture of the Mathcad contents that is as sharp and presentable as the surrounding (MsWord) text. I guess that should meet the quality required by Rogelio's press editor.

Luc

[MikeArmstrong]

Superb explanation Luc.

Mike

[rdelascasas]

Thank you very much Luc for the thorough explanation. I will follow your advice, I will keep you all posted with the results.

kind regards,

Rogelio 

[LucMeekes]

Some extra tips.

In the example I copied a number of Mathcad regions and pasted it/them into the Word document. This becomes one picture in Word.

If you copy one single (math or text or other) region from the Mathcad sheet and paste it into your Word document (as a windows metafile picture of course) it becomes a picture by itself in that document. Copy another region from Mathcad and paste it into the Word document gets you another picture. Now depending on the sizes of these (Mathcad) regions, these pictures may show their content in different sizes in your Word document.

What I often do is embed the Mathcad equations in a (Mathcad) text region, and I make sure that the Mathcad text region is set to 'occupy page width'. That is a property for a text region that you can set.

Now copying those text regions and pasting them into the Word document will make sure they are all the same width (the height may differ), and this will make it easier to ensure that the pictures in Word show their equations and other stuff as much as possible in the same proportions that they have in Mathcad.

But embedding math in text regions in Mathcad has its limitations. You cannot embed a graph into a text region in Mathcad. I suggest you make sure your math (and graph and picture and other regions) are no wider than the Mathcad page width (= the width of the 'occupy page width' text regions). Now you should be able to easily keep proportions in your Word document if you copy with every (set of) Mathcad regions at least one such 'occupy page width' text region over. You'll probably have explanatory text interleaved with your equations, graphs etc., so there should be no problem having an 'occupy page width' text region close to any (set of) region(s) that you need to copy over.

Now in Word you can set the attributes of the resulting pictures to all have the same width to ensure equal proportions for everything copied over from Mathcad in the above described manner. This way you force the 'Mathcad page width' become equal to the width of the pictures you set in Word.  Note that when you paste a picture on an empty line in Word, (most often) it will be scaled to occupy the text width in your Word document. If that is suitable for all you need to bring over, you don't have to set the width for every picture individually.

In short: with a little preparation, you should be able to copy Mathcad content to a Word document without (too) much hassle AND get presentable results.

Success!
Luc

[rdelascasas]

thanks Luck for your explicit explanation.

To making the long story short, I prepare a book for corrosion protection (cathodic protection theory) with new equations and how to use them. So, the book is in the hands of the publisher to complete the final review. Them came to me saying that the equations were not having the dpi required. You already know the other side of the story.

Now, changing equation by equation in the book would be a cumbersome task. 

I have learned from each of the advices I have received here and what I ended up doing few hours ago is as follow: 

1) I created a pdf of a complete chapter, as they are right now.

2) I exported the pdf to TIFF file, the chapter was automatically separated per pages, each page being a TIFF file, when I checked the dpi of the TIFF files it was already 200 dpi.

3) I found a web site: https://convert.town, where you can select what dpi you want and you only have to upload the image file (in this case each of my TIFF files) and it converts the files automatically to the dpi to chose. I chose 300 dpi. And this worked perfect, it seems. I check the dpi of the new converted TIFF and it has the 300 dpi required by the publisher company.

I have sent them two pages, one with text and graphs and one with text and equations. 

I will let you know what the outcome is.

Again, thank you very much to all of you that helped me on this subject, this is the last "stone" (it seems) to have my book published.

Regards,

Rogelio

[rdelascasas · Accepted solution]

To all,

the method I explained later did not work, even the entire page had 300 dpi, the equations still looked fuzzy.

what at the end I had to do is copy and paste each equation again. 

How?

I copy from Mathcad and use the paste special in word as follow: paste special>paste link>picture (windows metafile).

This is the only way I found to paste as windows metafile in word. After few paste equations, I have brake the links that are created, but this way has created the best quality, the editor, at last accepted this quality.

in the case of the figures, the editor was ok receiving the pictures separately in jpg format and he will put them where they belong. When I tried to insert the figures (that were created in Autocad) directly in my word document, they do not look good.

thank you to all for your help.

Regards,

Rogelio