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I have various vector graphic images in PDF or EPS form (EPS is now only usable on Mac though), and they often contain embedded bitmap images and/or transparency.

When I import them into MS Word, they become rasterized (bitmapped) with a significant reduction in quality. But I need to print/save to PDF in high quality, preserving the vector graphic information (lines, scalable text, etc.). The solution of "opening the PDFs in Preview and exporting as a bitmap. Then you can control the resolution and get a better-looking result" does not preserve this scalability. How can I stop Word from ruining my graphics?

Research notes:

MacOS 10.14.6 with Word 16.54, but I think the issue is common to multiple versions based on some of the links below.

This question is very similar to How to stop Word from downsampling images, but the annoying thing this time is rasterizing, not downsampling.

Adobe Illustrator acts like it can export as EMF, which is supposedly a vector format, but the resulting file is practically unreadable on the Mac and does not solve the issue in Word (text characters were garbled).

Word compresses images by default. Word for Windows has a "do not compress images in file" option (which I am skeptical would help in the vector graphics case). But I need a different solution for Mac, because the "do not compress" option simply does not appear in the Preferences dialog on Mac. Some of Word's compression behavior can supposedly be controlled by a registry DWORD on Windows, but when I tried to guess at an equivalent parameter that works in com.microsoft.Office365V2.plist on the Mac, nothing happened.

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The clue is that the compression (or rasterization) happens on Save. So the workaround is to import the PDF, and print/save to PDF prior to saving the document.

There are a couple of bonus tricks. I'm not sure if it helped, but I did turn off all the image compression I could find:

enter image description here

But what definitely helped was turning off all the autosave, as I discovered by importing one vector graphic, importing a second one, saving to PDF, and seeing that the first one had already been degraded even though I never saved the document between importing the two graphics. An autosave operation had kicked in and ruined my graphics in the background.

enter image description here

I am praying that Microsoft doesn't see this post and decide to "fix the bug" so that images are compressed/rasterized on import, rather than on save.

Remember to turn autosave back on if you need it.

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