Re: Extracting BMD certificate scans from Word docs

Robert G. Eldridge wrote:
On occasions when I ask somebody to send a scanned copy of a
certificate they send it in a Word document.

Whilst I can ask them to send it as an image file in many cases they
simply don't know what they're doing so this is not always a solution.

Does anybody know a method of copying the image from the Word doc
whilst retaining its original quality, ie pixel size. You can tell in
the Word doc that it is a high DPI image but getting it out of Word is
the issue.

When I change the File/Page setup to, for example A3, and then enlarge
the image in Word to fit on the altered page size (and it looks good
on-screen) if I then copy/paste to a graphics application sometimes
only part of the certificate image is usually copied.

Any hints, tip or thoughts appreciated.

If the image is embedded in the document, then you can easily extract it using the following steps:

1. Open the Word document and locate the image. Click on the image and type Ctrl+C to copy it (or use the Copy option in the Edit menu).

2. Open the Paint application, which you can usually find under "Accessories" in the program list which appear when you click the Windows "Start" button at the bottom left of the screen.

3. In the Paint application window, type Ctrl+V to paste the image which you copied from Word (or use Paste in the Edit menu). You should now see the image in the Paint application window. You can save it as a BMP file (the default format in Paint) or as a JPEG or PNG, which may take less disk space.

BMP and PNG formats retain the full detail of the original image, but at the cost of having a very large file, especially for a *** of paper scanned at high resolution.

JPEG files tend to be a lot smaller, which is important if you plan to email the image, for example, but with JPEG, you will lose a little of the fine detail. It's a trade-off. You can always save the image as a BMP, then save it again as a JPEG and compare the two to see whether the quality of ther JPEG version is acceptable for your purposes.

If you plan to put the image on a web site, you will need to use either JPEG or PNG, since BMP is a proprietary Microsoft format which is not recognised by many non-Microsoft web browsers.

Hope this helps.

David Harper
Cambridge, England
.