For more information about EXP, check out the
EXP web site.| EXP and Acrobat | EXP to Word |
EXP and Acrobat form a powerful combination for technical documentation as well as presentations. A slides style sheet and template may be created that sets a page to be dimensioned for slides and in a landscape layout. In AA5, macros may be created to create bullet and other forms typically found in slides automatically.
Transitions may be inserted in an EXP file using PDF Marks included in EPS files. This was the default method for creating transitions for AA3. AA6 and AA7 have transition selections built into Acrobat, but they had to be done with JavaScript in AA5. Indeed, PowerPoint is ideal for many slide applications, but the equation formating in PPT is still a problem, similar to WORD. The use of EXP and Acrobat to create slides offers a useful alternative.
Creating PDFs from EXP. To create a PDF from EXP, you print to the Adobe PDF printer (Acrobat Distiller printer for versions AA5 and earlier). It is suggested that you use the job.options file available from IEEE for the creation of your PDF. This job.options file optimizes the graphics sampling and embeds all fonts as is needed for many electronic publication applications.
To ensure quality line graphs from many applications that may be pasted into EXP, you should either use a minimum line width of 1 point or change the display option in the Adobe PDF printer to be 300 dpi or less (1200 dpi is the default).
OUTLINE FONTS (Type 1): PDF with Type 1 fonts-267kB (Adobe outline fonts used to simulate TrueType)
True Type Fonts: PDF with Type 42 fonts-423kB (True Type)
PDF Writer should generally not be used. The PDF Writer was an optional install with AA5 and has been discontinued with later versions. The manual explicitly states that PDF Writer should be used only for simple text and often gave extremely poor results for graphics and had problems with embedding. (Fonts don't embed worth a darn and thus the result is just basic text. This is a well known problem with PDF Writer and it is not recommended for anything other than basic text. It is surprising that it is even released.)
Doc form RTF written from Type 42 PDF (Truetype fonts embedded): fonts.doc-112kB
This document is included to show how the fonts copy into a WORD form using the RTF output from Acrobat 5.0 with TrueType fonts (does not give the fonts correctly with Type 1 fonts). The fonts will copy, but not the formating of such things as equations. The DOC file creation from newer versions of Acrobat has improved with each version. AA6 and AA7 both have a DOC export. Unfortunately, the conversion of equations is still poor.
An alternative to the conversion to PDF and then to DOC is to export to LaTex. From there one can use TEX2Word, a product at a cost of about $99 that does a reasonable conversion of the equations to a MathType format in WORD. The formating is maintained to some extent. The graphics will all have to be copy-and-pasted to the WORD file. The process is not recommended, but when there is a need this may do the job. To my knowledge at this time (Aug 2006), there is no really good conversion from LaTeX to DOC and this product may be about as good as it gets.
Original Font File: fonts.wxp-8kB
At the suggestion of Simon Smith (the author of EXP), I have printed the Symbols.WXP file to PDF using the writer, Type 1 fonts, and Type 42 (TrueType) fonts. I then opened them in Acrobat 5.0 and saved each one to a TIF file set (An option in AA5.0). The same effects are shown as above, except that only the characters defined are displayed.
PDF with Type 42 Symbols-177kB (True Type)
Translation from EXP to WORD is fraught with problems. There are several issues:
To just copy the text, this can be done with copy-and-paste. You can succeed somewhat by creating a PDF and then saving to a DOC file from Acrobat. This latter will generally not retain the equations, but does retain the graphics and some of the formating for Acrobat 7. These examples are given for the Demo1.WXP file as follows
Obviously, the equations do not translate to the DOC file. To obtain the equations, one method is to simply copy them as graphics from the PDF file into the DOC file. A bit clumsy, but it works.
To get the equations in a form that can be edited, one may use a program called TEX2Word and process the LaTeX output from EXP to obtain the equations. The results are not perfect, but a lot simpler than starting in WORD. Unfortunately, the graphics do not copy in this case and they will have to be clipped into the DOC file. For the equations, you need to install at least the lite version of MathType for editing the DOC file. Examples of the three EXP demonstration files are linked below.
For more information about EXP, check out the
EXP web site.