Alright, I've got a doozy and I don't think it's possible to overcome. Bear in mind I'm a bit tired after work, so if none of this makes sense just say something.

I work at a company that requires the use of electronic signatures (That's what we call them, they are scanned images of the signatures). Now, people get fired or retire or whatever, and we have to go in and delete and renter signatures for 15-20 documents every time this happens (I've worked there for 3 weeks now and it's happened twice). This is time consuming and since we use mergfields for virtually everything, I've been trying to find a way to make the signatures variable too.

So, I can do it. I can put in variable signatures all day long with { INCLUDEPICTURE }. The issue I'm having is formatting it so that it sits on a signature line, and runs 'over' text. Like a real signature. It looks nice and I'm struggling with the idea of ruining that if I don't have to (I work for attorneys after all, and they really deserve the best with all the schooling and stuff they went through).

So I've tried about a hundred different things. Tables don't work, underlining no… The only thing I have yet to do is take the 50-75 signatures into photoshop and edit them the way they ought to be (transparency, resizing, etc). I don't have photoshop at work.

The technique I've been trying to get to work involves text fields (Forms? Or whatever they're called. The boxes). I create a text field box, write out the code, get the image in there and then set it to text wrap "behind text."

It all falls down after that. It goes behind, stays in place as it ought to but… you know back when MSPaint still left white boxes behind the text and you had no option to make that transparent? So when you inserted text boxes over images they were literally white boxes with text in. Very gross looking. That's what's happening. My image is "hidden" behind the text because of the white space around them.

I would give an example, but I'm on a mac.

Anybody have any ideas? On how to make this work, or another way of going about it? I cannot use VBA, and I have to keep this as simple as possible so that everyone in my department can do it. We're all using Word 2007 on Windows 7.



Thanks ahead of time!

Hi JarSqwuid,

Your description suggests your font has some kind of background effect turned on or that you're using a special font, as it's not normal for the area behind the text to obstruct an image with the 'behind text' attribute.

Other than that, your process description sounds about right, though I'm not sure where mergefields come into play unless you're doing a mailmerge.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]