Today’s task is something that should be simple–I have our radio club logo in vector form as an Illustrator CS2 image (with nothing but vectors, arcs, and text) and need to a scalable vector version that can be used in applications such as PowerPoint. Windows’ Enhanced Metafile (EMF) is the perfect choice for this, since it can support all of these drawing elements correctly, and with 32-bit precision.

WMF, the older 16-bit Windows Meta File standard from Windows 3.1, is not as capable, and is not capable of rendering the line joins correctly, and doesn’t even support arcs and circles. The Windows 95 version of WMF does support arcs and circles, but is still problematic.

Exporting the logo from Illustrator is easy enough, with the Export command. And using Windows XP’s Preview feature in Windows Explorer shows the result to be a perfect copy of the Illustrator file. However, when placing that EMF in Word or PowerPoint (Office XP), the line joins are incorrectly beveled, making the logo ugly and incorrect.

One problem with Illustrator is that it doesn’t let you choose between the two flavors of EMF–the original GDI based EMF from Windows 2000, or the enhanced GDI+ based EMF from Windows XP.

Since Windows XP’s image preview handles the EMF logo just fine but the Office XP applications don’t, I’m fairly confident that the problem lies with Microsoft’s code, not Adobe’s.

There needs to be a reliable way to include high-quality, scalable company logos in a wide range of software that design firms use in their communication and marketing efforts. For at least the Windows platform, this means EMF, so let’s get this right folks!