Image watermarks created on MSWord seem to lose transparency, how to workaround?

ammara · August 3, 2021, 11:44pm

Hello,
My colleagues and I have to edit documents created by clients using MS Word. A constant issue is that the watermarks they create in Word would have some transparency applied there, but when opened in Writer the image is fully 100% opaque, which is quite an issue since we need to convert these files to PDF before sending them on to recipients, and the result doesn’t look good.

Is there any known way to workaround this issue? perhaps the problem is with my clients misconfiguring MS Word somehow?

Things I tried:

Googling. Found plenty of articles about creating transparent watermarks in Writer, with various methods for various versions, but we’d really like to stop recreating the watermarks manually every time.
Convincing clients to switch to Libre. Could not do, and frankly it seems hopeless.
Reporting this as a bug, got no attention.

EarnestAl · August 4, 2021, 12:26am

I created a docx with Word 2010, transparency is slightly darker on LO Writer 7.1.5.2
Testing Watermark from Word.docx (19.6 KB)
If you can’t do the following are you able to upload a sample document with the text replaced by some random words?
I can adjust the transparency (even to zero) by selecting the watermark, opening the sidebar to Navigator then altering its transparency in Properties. Cheers, Al

ammara · August 4, 2021, 1:44am

Apologies, I should’ve specified. The issue is for image watermarks. I do not seem to be able to upload attachments here (not enough rep?) but here’s an external link.

I simply opened Word, added a Watermark in the most basic way I could see (Design > Watermark > Custom Watermark > Picture), saved the file, opened it with Writer 7.1.5, 7.2-rc, and 7.3-alpha. In all cases the transparency is lost.

EarnestAl · August 4, 2021, 3:10am

Sorry, I didn’t test with an image. It seems to be
tdf#120762
&
tdf#85757
It would take extra time to extract the image from within the document, then delete the existing watermark and add the extracted image back as watermark in Writer with say 70% or 80% transparency and then resize to approx original dimensions.

ammara · August 4, 2021, 8:09am

@EarnestAl Thank you for your help. I just realized I posted the response as a second answer, apologies about that.

So, an 8 year old open bug! wow, time to abandon hope for sure. Alright, so the manual method is all there is. We’ll figure something out, thank you very much.