I like the way Hirsch carefully chooses the range of the Y axis to make the peaks look sharp. It's a very useful technique that I first learned in "How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrel Huff.

I note that a few posters here also use the same technique, to  .. "enhance" the point they are trying to make.

I agree with you. Some people also manipulate the aspect ratio to make curves look flat.
I'm just posting this here because I didn't want to forget, I knew it would appear as close to the top of the list as was practically possible, and I didn't want to be too intrusive.

Plus, I totally agree with your point, Khebab.

Does anybody know how to either post a single PDF page from a PDF file?

Or...even better... copy or cut a section of a PDF page ("crop") and turn cropped section into a JPEG, GIF, or something else "html" compatible as image?

Or...for the Grand-Prize...take data in a table which appears on a PDF page and export it into an excel spreadsheet?

Major points will be awarded.

Does this work?


1)Click on camera icon on toolbar to the right of the "select text" icon in Adobe.
2)In PDF draw line around the image
3)It should say "Saved to clipboard". If not, then copy image
4)Paste into another program (Word seems to work)
5)Save word document as html.
6)Go to place you saved the document and look for html file and image


1)Follow steps 1-3 above
2)Paste into Excel

You better believe it works. I could never figure that out. I never knew what the camera icon was. It doesn't look like a camera to me unless you know it is supposed to be a camera. It worked in both Word and Excel. Although I used the "Select Table" tool for Excel. Thanks buddy, you just made my week and saved me probably at least 1000 hours off the rest of my life.

Major points awarded.

I sort of learned that from the Excel Bible, which noted that you can't save Excel directly as jpgs and suggested a similar methodology. How are you saving Excel charts and tables in html compatible format?

Sometimes I want to save a chart in Excel as an image and have to paste them first into Word or Powerpoint, which gives the image options under "paste special", then back into Excel. Any better ways to do it?

That's exactly how I do it. I haven't figured a better way. It is a wicked pain. I just had never been able to do it with PDF.

With tables I use an option that ends up being PNG I think it is, it gives better large image quality than JPEG. Other times I use bitmap option. But mostly it is the Windows enhanced metafile, I think. I never use the paste as excel object option, it always screws things up. I always post into Word with images and then access image in separate folder like you laid out.

Hi Oil Ceo

I have found another way in which PDF files can be made into other formats in the following sequence, and it allows latitude in editing pictures and text.

  1.  Copy a PDF excerpt (or page) to a clipoard, thence paste onto Microsoft Power Point slide.  With the resulting power point master adjust size, also add features text, etc as you may wish.  

  2.  Then save the power point in other available "save as" formats that include JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and other options,  The power point slides and figures can easily be saved in all those formats, This is a really handy feature of power point

I have prepared several power point technical symposium presentatons then saved as JPEG to send the presentation around as a normal illustrated email.   This approach using power points as an intermediate step also preserves fidelity reasonably for editing and anntating digital photos of all sorts for emailing.    
Wow! Thanks for that. I never thought I'd get two complete workable answers so fast. You guys are great.

Major points also awarded.

Another fast way is to copy anything on your computer screen is to use shift/Print Screen buttons.  This copies your entire screen.  Then use a program like Irfanview (free download on the internet) to paste into.

Once loaded in Irfanview, you can crop any section of your screen shot and save it as a jpg or gif file.  Irfanview also allows for easy resizing and basic color corrections.

I use this all the time at work for documentation purposes.

Very Good. Quick and Dirty, I like that. I'm gonna play with this one. Thanks.
Thanks guys, I just saved all your Inst. into my Adobe Folder
I found a handy free utility, Pixie, for grabbing screen color values.  Very useful when making CSS style sheets.

Sorry, non-oil issue.  But totally and way cool nonetheless.

Ed

I take full credit for taking it off-topic. My apologies to Khebab for posting the question. I didn't expect to get this many responses - and so quick. You guys are great. I just wanted to pull some Iraq numbers off a PDF. You and Dragonfly get full points as well.
Glad to help.  Keep plugging the numbers and displaying the stats. Onward TOD soldiers.
There's a cool Firefox extension that does that.  I don't know how I lived without it.
Details Please ? :-)
IIRC, it's called "Colorzilla."  

Can't check right now, because I don't have it installed on this computer.

So that makes it OK then ;)
That's a quibble. It certainly would have been better to be consistent, but correcting the Y-axis doesn't really change the point. The X-axes were consistent, so I distorted the Y-axes of the other graphs to match the right, percentage of maximum, axis on the Texas graph.

Texas

North America

UK

Norway

Sorry, but cutting and pasting changed the backgrounds from beige to black for some reason. Copy and paste these side-by-side into your favorite image editor to verify for yourself that the percentage ticks on the right axis line up.

The point is the same. None of them have smooth logistic curve shapes. I suspect we know why: when production levels out, a producer increases the drilling rate to increase production. This attempt to increase production at peak succeeds temporarily, but at the cost of damaging the field and increasing the initial decline rate.