A customer was frantically trying to import a graphic logo into word (and email), but whenever he printed the document, he got a black rectangle where the logo should have been.

He’s using office 2003.

I try printing the logo from the windows image viewer… and it prints correctly. I can also print other images from word correctly.

At first I think it might be an MSWord problem, but I cannot see an obvious cause.

I find out the logos have been newly created by a nearby graphic design company (ablazing grafix), and they can print the imported logos from Microsoft Word without any problem.

I take the CD with all the logos, and try it at the office (on my old office XP).

Well, when importing, I get “an error occurred while importing this file”… On another PC, the import seems to work, but the colours are lighter than when viewed from irfanview…

I decide to use irfanview to resave the images.

Since the CD has 3 logo sizes (small medium and large), and 3 different color types (colour, grayscale, and black/white), I take the large colour image, and resize it to the same resolution of the small image, and save it with a similar name as the existing small logo.

I can see some differences:

– the new logo is about half the size of the original.

– the new logo is much better quality (no jaggies due to proper anti-aliasing)

– the logo can be viewed and printed within word.

I looked at the hex codes within the original logo, and it seems that it was saved from an adobe product (maybe photoshop).

I guess that ablazing grafix didn’t use proper anti-aliasing, and only use a state of the art version of MSWord.

After I hand over the “corrected” logos, ablazing admits that they saved the logos as a CMYK jpegs (instead of RGB)… I didn’t think that the jpeg format allowed for CMYK and RGB, so I looked it up and sure enough, it looks like jpegs can be either format.