How to Draw Angles in Word?

Question

I use Microsoft Word to write a tehcnical document. When I embed illustrations in the document, I use a canvas [my own translation from Swedish ('arbetsyta')] and draw inside it. This way I can manage the whole illustration as one single 'package'. However, I experience one problem with this approach (besides a large number of bugs in Word). I use a circle sector to draw angles between two lines, as illustrated below (the angle φ).

But now I cannot crop the canvas as to remove the large whitespace in the upper part of it, because the circle sector occupies this area:

What is the most convenient workaround?

Solution

Word is fine for the letters, but not for drawing. I reccomend using a different software for drawing and embedding pdf, emf or any other format to the Word document.
If that is too difficult or you have other reasons for not using some external image editor you can use a general curve or an arc of smaller diameter than would be geometrically precise.

Comments

[mbq]

Stop using MS Word -- go with LaTeX, which can just handle vector pictures in PDFs made by any CAD or powerful drawing application (Inkscape, CorelDraw, Illustrator) or specified in TkiZ (for many technical stuff, it may be easier to write TkiZ script than to draw). And you will make perfect equations in a blink of an eye and save tons of time lost in fights with Word's pseudointelligent autoformatting.

[Andreas Rejbrand]

@mbq: I know. Generally, I am a big fan of Microsoft, but the latest versions of Microsoft Word (2007 and 2010) are the most buggy products I have ever used... Still, it would be quite a lot of work to convert my 300-page book at this time...

[mbq]

I can bet you will lose more time fighting with Word. About Microsoft -- I have no problem with this company, except of the fact that they waste a huge amount of a very good work of their programmers trying to implement fundamentally flawed ideas like WYSIWYG, retards-must-be-able-to-use-our-software-so-we-will-ignore-a‌​ll-others or we-must-copy-any-successful-product-of-our-competitors. Hopefully most of the GNU ecosystem works on Windows.

[Andreas Rejbrand]

@mbq: I cannot agree more that it is a very bad idea to write long, technical documents in Word. LaTeX is far superior. In addition, there is absolute no risk of data loss or file corruption, since the entire document is plain-text, and you can fix all problems yourself. Still, the biggest problem with Word, since 2007, is that it is incredibly buggy. Among other things, documents alter themselves (single characters go missing, the formatting is changed when you open the document the next time), Word crashes almost daily, and, worst of all, documents self-corrupt leading to loss of data.

[Nour Kembal]

Goto Math.StackExchange.com and ask them for Math drwawing software, but first search, I think you would find it has already been answered. Also use Lyx for Latex to do math papers not Word.

[Lukas]

I use CorelDRAW, but many other support emf, and Word can take pdf...