Thanks for replying.

It looks like I don't have any perfect solution though. I have now realized that when I paste into Word or Coreldraw as a metafile it causes other problems with the graphics. They are not as obvious as the ones I get when I paste as an enhanced metafile So I didn't immediately notice them), but they are in fact an even bigger problem. I can manually fix the problems in one case, but not in the other.

Thanks Wade. I am new to AI though (just trying to migrate from CorelDraw) and your image is too low resolution for me to be able to figure out where you are in the software. Could you give me a pointer or two.

Thanks

Richard

How about exporting it from MathCad as a metafile or as a PDF and placing either format?

I can print to a pdf. I tried this using CutePDF, and although the graphics look fine in Adobe Reader when I import to AI it has problems with the fonts (which is just stock Tahoma, so I can't imagine why). I'll try some other print options, and see if I can make it work this way though.

Is it possible to get one of the PDFs? You would likely need to upload it and provide a link.

Sure. Kind of annoying that you can't upload files here, so I posted this to the Mathcad forums

communities.ptc.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/175138-34581/PDF_test .pdf

Apart from the font problems, I notice that when I import the pdf above the graph comes in as a couple of thousand small lines, rather than one curve. That makes subsequent editing all but impossible.

Sigh

There are clipboard viewer that can save out as metafiles. Don't know if that would work for you or not as i have never used one.

That's a good idea, but I don't think it will help.If I look at the graphic using the clipboard viewer, I see the problems there. So it looks like the problem is what Mathcad sends to the clipboard.

I think my best bet for now is just to paste the graphic, and fix the errors by hand. Thanks for the help though.

If CS5 or CS5.1, then just use Select>Same Stroke Color and Cmd(Ctrl)-J to Join the small pieces into a single line. Then use Object>Path>Simplify with a 98% curve accuracy to reduce the number of anchor points in the line. When I did this it reduced the 2 lines from +1900 points to 112.

Excellent tips

CorelDraw (at least, the older version I was using) had nothing like these options. I am going to use these a lot!

I did notice that when I use OldBob's method to bring the pdf into AI the selection by stroke color doesn't work. The small pieces of line are brought in as small elliptical (sort of elliptical, anyway) paths. For some reason if I select one of them and then select the same stroke color it selects everything in the graphic.

As for the font, just reset in a font you have on your system.

I don't get any options to substitute a font when the file is loaded. If I select the text and then change the font I get garbage characters. At a guess, I would say it's not handling the Unicode characters correctly.