EMF files damaged during PDF export in Microsoft Word

Question

I often use EMF images to illustrate technical documents I write in Microsoft Word (since Word doesn't support SVG). But there has always been one major issue: often a single (vector) line in an EMF file is damaged during PDF export (using the built-in PDF export feature of Word 2007+). Here are some examples:

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As you can see, in every EMF image, a single line is severely displaced in the PDF version.

Is there some way to resolve this issue? Why does it happen? You can examine the problem yourself using this original EMF file.

(I am using Microsoft Word 2010.)

Answer 1

Do NOT use the built-in PDF export feature of Word, it will break your EMF figures.

I found a solution.

1. Open your word file.
2. file -> print.
3. select the printer as "Microsoft Print to PDF".
4. click the print button.
5. save the PDF file.

This works for Word 2016.

Answer 2

I believe I have found a solution:

1. Open the EMF file in Microsoft PowerPoint.
2. Right click the image, and select "Save as image...".
3. Save the image as a Windows Metafile (*.wmf) -- not an Enhanced Windows Metafile (*.emf).
4. The obtained file can be used without problems in Word -- it will not cause any problems when the document is exported to a PDF file.

Answer 3

I had faced a similar problem when saving the Word document as PDF. I was trying to insert a few graphs produced by gnuplot EMF terminal. The Word version looked (and printed) OK, but when exported to PDF, the Y-axis label did not show up at all. I searched for the label text in the PDF viewer and found that it was moved to somewhere outside the margin.

After trying various things, I solved this by converting/exporting the EMF files using Inkscape. I used the command line as it is much faster. The following command processes the original 'graph.emf' and saves it as 'graph_fixed.emf' which can be converted to PDF properly in Word.

inkscape -M graph_fixed.emf graph.emf

There are a few issues of Inkscape command line on Windows as well. It does not work well with backslashes and spaces in the path. So I added the Inkscape directory (C:\Program Files\Inkscape) to the path environment variable. Then I opened a command prompt and cd to the folder containing all graphs before using the above command.