Earlier this week Google announced the roll-out of its new search infrastructure named “Caffeine”.  Google claim that it provides  “50 percent fresher results” than it’s previous index.

A long time in the coming Google rolled out a public test in August last year against one of their data centers finishing it’s testing in November 2009. By all accounts it is expected that it has been rolled out worldwide to all data centers.

Much like any search engine, when performing a search on Google you’re not actually performing a search of the live web but a snapshot of the internet that known as the index. A search index is “like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need.”

The previous search index was broken into a number of layers with some layers with it’s main layer taking in the region of two weeks to refresh. Analysing the entire stored snapshot of the web (index) before making those pages available to be searched against .

Due to the ever increasing size of the internet and growth of content including images, videos and real-time updates (such as micro blogging) Google decided to improve the infrastructure to meet the demand of more current and relevant search results.

As opposed to it’s previous method of analysing the entire web before refreshing it’s top layer, Caffeine continuously updates it’s index analysing smaller portions of the web meaning that we can “find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published” .

Problem: Using a background image in a word document, converting to Adobe Acrobat PDF will loose the background image.

I had been looking to empower one of my clients to create better looking literature without having to get us to build all of them in Illustrator. Word templates seemed the way to go, better looking day-to-day business communication and anything more complicated would come to us t design & lay-up.

• Having first tried using the header and footer feature in Word found it too hard to recreate the style, copy & position the logos + only to find logos/colours opaque.
• Then tried using the background image [Page colour >  Fill Effects > Picture (in Office 2007 this is all under the Page Layout tab)] which looked perfect except when converting a document to PDF it lost the background image. No settings I changed seemed to change this, nor using the “print” to PDF on the PC.

Finally the solution:

Add your image as a Watermark, simples.

Word 2007 > Page Layout tab > Watermark >  Custom Watermark > select the picture > untick Washout (This will mean the background image isn’t faded).

If you wish to design a background image to fill an entire word document at 100% scale I would suggest 800 x 1300.