How to copy drawing from LibreOffice Draw to MS Word?

Question

What is the best way to copy a drawing (complete document) from LibreOffice Draw into an MS Word document (using MS Word) on Windows?

A "naive" copy&paste form Draw to Word gives next to useless results. The bitmap method gives too low resolution, the metafile loses other details (missing lines, text etc.)

It is similar if I export the drawing from LOD to an EPS or WMF/EMF file and then inserting that into Word: many details are lost or wrong.

I ended up exporting to high resolution PNG (300 dpi) and inserting that into Word.

There must be a better way (that preserves the vector nature of the drawing).

PS: I noticed exporting to PDF gives "perfect" results. Could that (a PDF file or part of it) be imported into Word maybe?

Answer 1

Your is a common problem with Word and I have the impression that Microsoft didn't like so much the idea to enhance the compatibility with Openoffice. I would like to suggest the use of Latex, BTW it is not always possible.

Since you noticed that you can produce the desired effect exporting as PDF, I decide to report here an interesting blog page for MacOS that can used to get hints to import a vectorial PDF inside Microsoft Word: the procedure is not fast but it avoids to fix the draw on a grid (as you do converting to PNG).

The main solution is based on pstoedit tools.
Once that you have your PDF (or eps) file you can convert in EMF by command line too.

Those are some command lines suggested:

• pstoedit -f emf diagram.pdf/eps output.emf
• pstoedit -f emf -pta diagram.pdf/eps output.emf
  Place letters individually, if text looks odd
• pstoedit -f "emf:-m" diagram.pdf/eps output.emf
  Use Arial as font, if font looks wrong
• pstoedit -f emf -drawbb diagram.pdf/eps output.emf
  Force drawing of bounding box – try this if you get cropping
• pstoedit -f emf -xscale 2 -yscale 2 diagram.pdf/eps output.emf Scale up – use this if lines look blocky; experiment with larger values than 2
• pstoedit -f "emf:-m" -pta -drawbb diagram.pdf/eps output.emf
  A combination of some of above

You can search a program to manage images that works fine with vectorial format under your operative system. Maybe you want to give a look to inkscape or intaglio for OS.

At the end you may prefer to fix the grid if the image as PNG file, maybe with the same resolution of the printer you're going to use (even 600 dpi or more if this is the case) and to save your time.

Answer 2

An answer can be found in the article what is the best way to draw in LibreOffice that is ready for exporting to MS Word?, answered by the poster himself :

My question was not about SVG graphic, but how to create drawings with LibreOffice, so MS Word could open it as well. SVG was one approach I was hoping it would be working...

This approach is pretty good (actually perfect):

1. Draw objects in LibreOffice Draw
2. Copy to clipboard (CTRL+V)
3. Paste Special in LibreOffice Writer (Shift+Ctrl+V)
4. Select GDI metafile
5. Now you can save your document in any format (odt, docx, doc) without fear of being unrecognized when opened in MS Word or LibreOffice Writer again.

What I discovered that GDI metafile is not the same as WMF or EMF format, because when drawing is exported from Draw to WMF or EMF, and then imported to Writer -> printing to PDF does not work (from LibreOffice Writer), as well as some other problem. However, copy->paste works just fine.

I am using LibreOffice 4.0.3.3. with Ubuntu 13.04.