Extracting PNG vector graphics from Word.doc documents?

Piet van Oostrum wrote:
> The
> confusion might be caused by the fact that copy and paste from a Word
> document produces a bitmap. I don't think Word (and Powerpoint) can copy a
> vector image to the clipboard. Or at least I never succeeded to do that.
> (OK within the application itself it does, but I mean to another
> application. Maybe between the two of them they also do.)

When you copy something to the clipboard, the application has the
opportunity to offer one or more formats. Often the data is not
actually placed on the clipboard when you hit Ctrl-C; only an offer is
placed. The data transfer doesn't take place until you paste it in the
other application (or, if you close the providing application, you
might be asked if you want to leave so much data on the clipboard).

When you copy a picture or drawing from Word 2003, it usually puts most
of the following offers on the clipboard:
* Picture (Windows Metafile)
* Picture (Enhanced Metafile)
* MS Office Drawing Object
* HTML Format
* Picture (GIF)
* Picture (PNG)
* Picture (JPEG)
(You can see this list by choosing "Paste Special" from the edit menu
after copying something to the clipboard.)

Only the top three are actually (potential) vector formats. The others
are raster bitmaps.

It is up to the receiving application to choose a data format from
those offered. Since the top three are all Microsoft-designed formats,
it's not terribly likely that another application will be able to
receive them. One of the applications that *can* receive one of these
vector formats is OpenOffice.org: choosing "Paste Special" shows that
"GDI Metafile" is selectable (which is the same as Windows Metafile, I
believe). Unfortunately transparency seems to be lost.

Of course, an enterprising individual could always write his own
program that can accept one of these clipboard formats and save it out
as a metafile, or even run it through ps2edit and get EPS format.

In article <1160073719.080666.42460 DeleteThis @m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com>,
"rpresser" <rpresser DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:

> When you copy something to the clipboard, the application has the
> opportunity to offer one or more formats. Often the data is not
> actually placed on the clipboard when you hit Ctrl-C; only an offer is
> placed. The data transfer doesn't take place until you paste it in the
> other application (or, if you close the providing application, you
> might be asked if you want to leave so much data on the clipboard).

As a side comment on this, I just ran into an interesting clipboard
behavior in the Mac version of Mathematica.

Mathematica divides its notebooks into "cells" (sort of like fenced-off
paragraphs) which have different formats (and functions) for their text
contents.

Select and Copy a "Header" cell and do a series of Pastes into the
spaces between other cells in the notebook; you can insert the copied
Header as a new (but identical) Header cell elsewhere in the notebook.

Suppose you make an error and Paste the copied Header cell, not between
cells as intended, but into (inside) an Input cell for example. The
Header cell text becomes Input text in the Input cell -- and also, when
you next go to Paste the copied Header cell between cells, it no longer
Pastes as a Header cell, but as an Input cell.

In other words, the pasted clipboard contents have apparently been
modified by the mere act of pasting them somewhere -- which I don't
think is the way the Apple GUI is supposed to work . . . ?