Convert Visio Drawing to PDF

[Born2bwire]

I need to convert Visio drawings into PDF's for latex figures. I have not found a good way to do this. The best that I can do is draw the figure in Visio, save it in Visio as an EMF, open the EMF in OpenOffice and save as an EPS and then in linux convert the EPS to PDF.

The reason for the convoluted process is that I need to keep the drawing in a vector format so that I do not have any quality problems when scaling it in latex. That's why I do not want to save it as a JPEG or anything. The other problem is that if, for example, I use a postscript printer driver (HP Lasterjet 5/5M PS) to generate the EPS directly from Visio, the bounding box of the EPS is incorrect. Having OpenOffice export the figure as an EPS generally guarantees that the bounding box is set correctly.

The problem I am having now is that one of my drawings uses a fill to create hatching. This hatching is not preserved doing my usual process. For some reason the hatching is not shown when OpenOffice opens the EMF. I have tried saving it in Visio as a SVG and using Xara Xtreme to open the SVG to export to EPS but it doesn't render the SVG for some reason and exports garbage.

So does anyone know how I can start with a Visio drawing and convert it into a PDF without compromising the quality or bounding box so that it can be inserted into a latex document?

 

[MrChad]

Have you tried using a PDF printer like PDFCreator or CutePDF?

What version of Visio are you using?

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: MrChad
Have you tried using a PDF printer like PDFCreator or CutePDF?

What version of Visio are you using?

CutePDF doesn't work because it does not correctly set the bounding box. The output is an entire letter page and not the size of the graphic itself. I'll try PDFCreator.

I'm using Visio 2003.

 

[Born2bwire]

No dice on PDFCreator. I think any of the pdf and eps printers are not going to work because they print the object set to a specified paper size where I need the size to be the extents of the image since I am inserting these into a document.

I downloaded an extension for OpenOffice to open svg files. The hatching on the image is still corrupted. Maybe I'll just delete the hatching, open the svg and see if I can add the hatching manually in OpenOffice since the svg file can allow me to ungroup the individual components. Before, the emf file was one single image where the svg I can decompose it into the boxes and such that makes up the image and then I can fill the boxes with hatching accordingly. Maybe I can figure out how to do that...

EDIT: Well that worked, but it still doesn't solve the complexity of the whole process.

 

[rivan]

Have you tried changing the paper size when generating the PDF?

I haven't used Cute or PDFCreator (or Visio for that matter) in a very long time but you should have paper options available somewhere. Set those paper options to a size that will accommodate your artwork. If you need larger paper sizes than you have available, install a large format postscript printer driver like an Epson 10000 or HP 2500. Some printer drivers have a "Custom Page" setting as well that might help you.

If you don't see a page size that's a good fit, go with a page size too large, then crop the PDf with Cute or whatever.

 

[rivan]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
No dice on PDFCreator. I think any of the pdf and eps printers are not going to work because they print the object set to a specified paper size where I need the size to be the extents of the image since I am inserting these into a document.

I downloaded an extension for OpenOffice to open svg files. The hatching on the image is still corrupted. Maybe I'll just delete the hatching, open the svg and see if I can add the hatching manually in OpenOffice since the svg file can allow me to ungroup the individual components. Before, the emf file was one single image where the svg I can decompose it into the boxes and such that makes up the image and then I can fill the boxes with hatching accordingly. Maybe I can figure out how to do that...

EDIT: Well that worked, but it still doesn't solve the complexity of the whole process.

On EPS generation: this will vary widely from one application to another. Some apps crop content at the page bounds (presumably trying to make it easier on you), some include all image data.

Does your version of Visio not yet support publish as PDF? Or does that rasterize it?