How to prevent Word from rasterizing embedded pdfs

Question

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)

Answer 1

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!