Exporting vector graphics

[xtknight]

I work at an institute that produces an annual Word document with lots of vector graphics in it. One of these is a statewide county-boundary map, of which I have an Adobe Illustrator (.ai) format file. Saving this into different formats with Illustrator yielded less-than-perfect output, with the "confetti" fill style ending up black in output formats such as svg and eps. Preferably I would like a simplistic SVG output so that I could put this picture on the web if I ever needed to, but the main output will be a PDF file.

Postscript (.ps) works but as far as I can tell Word only imports .eps (Encapsulated ps) in a vector format, which didn't export properly with Illustrator. I get the same black output on the confetti pattern when I use Inkscape.

Do you have any suggestions as to what programs I should use so that I can export this pattern properly, or another better method of getting this vector graphic into Word? (They previously only imported it in raster form.)

Eventually what I am going to need to do is to change the numbers already inside the county boundaries and change the backgrounds of each county space based on the range which contains its number. So, it would be dually helpful if the format I output in could be read in automatically and edited. It is fine if I have to hardcode some hex addresses, but when I exported the file into EMF I did not see any text in the hexdump that I could edit. Perhaps the text was converted to paths, which would probably be unacceptable.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[imported_keebler]

It has been a long time since I worked with those file types, but isn't there a format called .wmf that is windows based you could use?

 

[corkyg]

Why not try converting the whole file, graphics and all to PDF?

 

[xtknight]

corkyg: I'd like to have it in something easy to edit. So this probably means having a Word document. Would I be able to get it into Word (in vector) after converting to PDF somehow? The file right now is standalone, and although I did have more success printing to ps and pdf, I am not sure how I would get this "back" into Word. Dragging the ps back in invokes an Illustrator ps rasterizer to place the image into Word (ends up looking quite poor), which is not what I prefer.

I think I've finally found out what I'm going to do, though. Illustrator's EMF export actually worked fine and I realized that it somewhat preserved the text after learning about EMF files. It is stored in 16-bit Unicode, but Illustrator for some reason splits up the text at times (to preserve readability?) I should be able to edit this adequately by searching for the text structures and automatically replacing it with my data. I was hoping to have a ready-made solution but developing a program in-house to do this is fine with me if I can manage that.

It looks like that is the only way I am going to get what I want since I'm picky.

But I also found that exporting to "Tiny SVG 1.1" gave me editable text in an XML format. It had to rasterize the confetti, but this was fine as long as my rasterization DPI was 300 or higher. The SVG was however not something I could import into Word reliably, and it rendered very slowly and inaccurately in Firefox. I'd love to be able to put this document on the web too, but posting the pdf itself is probably the best option for now. I hope that Distiller can process the Word doc and EMF files fine or that I can somehow substitute a .ps that does work but I have yet to investigate that. I just wanted the whole workflow to be as vector as possible, because that made the most logical sense to me. I don't like images that are unnecessarily blurrier and bigger in size (raster).