I’ve just installed my ScanJet 4670, and pressing the scan button on the unit presents me with a dialog box that allows me to choose among all of the programs installed on my system that can interface with the scanner. So here’s the list:

• Canon ZoomBrowser EX
• hp scanning software
• Microsoft Office Publisher
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop

First, the non-obvious. I have Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Professional. So then, why is Publisher listed, but not Adobe InDesign? And why is the rest of Office 2003 missing? Word, PowerPoint, Clip Organizer, Excel, and Office Imaging all support scanning, yet aren’t listed.

As for PhotoShop, since I upgraded from CS to CS2, some of these four on the list are CS, and some are CS2, but the dialog box doesn’t tell me which is which. And why four? I only have two versions installed here.

I’ll have to investigate this further, when I’ve taken care of higher-priority items.

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!

I was experimenting with a new web service this morning for our local ham radio club, and the profile page requested an icon of a very specific size: 48 pixels square. Since I have our club logo as an Illustrator vector image, this should have been an easy, one-step process. Right?

Wrong. Although the Save for Web command in Illustrator allowed me to save the vector image to a PNG raster image directly, I could only resize the aspect ratio that Illustrator had chosen (48×30). Getting the simple square image desired required me to open the image in Photoshop, change the canvas size and specify on which edge(s) blank pixels were to be added to fill in the rest of the space.

Needing to save vector artwork to very specific image sizes is so common–in creating icons, Web ads, and many other tasks, that I’m amazed the ability to specify the export size and dimensions has not been a part of Illustrator for years.