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I use Microsoft Word to write a tehcnical document. When I embed illustrations in the document, I use a canvas [my own translation from Swedish ('arbetsyta')] and draw inside it. This way I can manage the whole illustration as one single 'package'. However, I experience one problem with this approach (besides a large number of bugs in Word). I use a circle sector to draw angles between two lines, as illustrated below (the angle φ).

A canvas with a circle sector

But now I cannot crop the canvas as to remove the large whitespace in the upper part of it, because the circle sector occupies this area:

A canvas with a selected circle sector

What is the most convenient workaround?

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    Stop using MS Word -- go with LaTeX, which can just handle vector pictures in PDFs made by any CAD or powerful drawing application (Inkscape, CorelDraw, Illustrator) or specified in TkiZ (for many technical stuff, it may be easier to write TkiZ script than to draw). And you will make perfect equations in a blink of an eye and save tons of time lost in fights with Word's pseudointelligent autoformatting.
    – mbq
    Oct 7, 2011 at 9:16
  • @mbq: I know. Generally, I am a big fan of Microsoft, but the latest versions of Microsoft Word (2007 and 2010) are the most buggy products I have ever used... Still, it would be quite a lot of work to convert my 300-page book at this time... Oct 7, 2011 at 9:18
  • I can bet you will lose more time fighting with Word. About Microsoft -- I have no problem with this company, except of the fact that they waste a huge amount of a very good work of their programmers trying to implement fundamentally flawed ideas like WYSIWYG, retards-must-be-able-to-use-our-software-so-we-will-ignore-all-others or we-must-copy-any-successful-product-of-our-competitors. Hopefully most of the GNU ecosystem works on Windows.
    – mbq
    Oct 7, 2011 at 9:31
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    @mbq: I cannot agree more that it is a very bad idea to write long, technical documents in Word. LaTeX is far superior. In addition, there is absolute no risk of data loss or file corruption, since the entire document is plain-text, and you can fix all problems yourself. Still, the biggest problem with Word, since 2007, is that it is incredibly buggy. Among other things, documents alter themselves (single characters go missing, the formatting is changed when you open the document the next time), Word crashes almost daily, and, worst of all, documents self-corrupt leading to loss of data. Oct 7, 2011 at 9:34
  • Goto Math.StackExchange.com and ask them for Math drwawing software, but first search, I think you would find it has already been answered. Also use Lyx for Latex to do math papers not Word.
    – jimjim
    Aug 28, 2012 at 0:11

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Word is fine for the letters, but not for drawing. I reccomend using a different software for drawing and embedding pdf, emf or any other format to the Word document.
If that is too difficult or you have other reasons for not using some external image editor you can use a general curve or an arc of smaller diameter than would be geometrically precise.

Word drawing - angle markup

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  • Yes, it would be good to use some external program for the drawings. Do you have any suggestions? A severe restriction, I guess, is that Word still doesn't support SVG, so the third-party application needs to be able to create EMF files. Oct 7, 2011 at 14:34
  • I use CorelDRAW, but many other support emf, and Word can take pdf...
    – Lukas
    Oct 7, 2011 at 14:39

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