I cannot pull embedded files from a word document, on my mac

Question

Hi - I've got a Mac. I'm trying to extract some .pdf files that are embedded in a word document, using the (recommended) StuffIt program, 

on my Mac. 

StuffIt does extract the files, but it creates all sorts of other file types (.emf, etc.) - I can't figure out how to get access to the pdf documents. 

Has anyone else figured out how to do this?

Thanks in advance, 

Donny Rowles

Answer 1

I'm not an authority on the subject but this is my understanding:

The key question is whether the PDFs actually were embedded using a Windows version of Word or whether they were inserted using a Mac version.

• In the first case there should be an embeddings folder in the unzipped Word document. That folder should contain the complete PDFs in PDF format.
• In the second case: Object Linking & Embedding [OLE] is a Windows technology which never has been fully implemented on the Mac operating system. It is supported in Mac Office only for Word documents & Excel files... PDF is not a supported OLE file type.

In Mac Word a PDF is inserted as a picture displaying only the first page of the PDF, which is processed as an EMF image file. The inserted EMFs are what you are finding in the media folder. Unfortunately, EMF is not native to Mac so they can be opened only by certain graphics programs which support that file type, Photoshop among others. Even then, only the inserted page will be included if the original PDF was a multi-page document. Also, the EMFs can be inserted into another Word document {Insert> Pictures - Picture from File] but will present only as a picture displaying the page that was inserted originally.

Answer 2

Thank you Bob - I appreciate your answer. Your answer is much better than was provided via the other Microsoft post I saw. 

Thanks again - this is really helpful.