I'm currently working on a suite of documents that were created in versions of Word ranging from Word 2000 to Word 2003. Most of the team is now using Word 2007... but that shouldn't be a problem, should it? The templates still work as expected, and the documents look fine while working on them. The problem only raised its head when I created the first press-ready PDF. What had happened to all the beautiful high-resolution diagrams? They looked awful - and there were a lot of them!
I wasted a bit of time messing about with Acrobat, making sure I hadn't accidentally changed a setting, but no - everything was still OK. A bit of searching online soon revealed what appears to be the culprit... the graphic filters in Word 2007 are different from previous versions. The .eps images have always looked a bit odd in Word - you are only seeing a low-resolution preview at that stage - but have always looked fantastic in the PDF sent to press. Now, the press-ready PDF didn't look any better than the Word document - the images were low-resolution and blocky. Fortunately opening the Word files in Word 2003 and creating the PDFs from there solved the problem... and I needed to add any new images in that format into Word 2003 as well.
Less than 24 hours before the deadline is not the time to find this out!!