Help with converting a Visio file into a PDF

[Combs, Richard]

Steve Rickaby wrote: 
 
> FWIW, I had have painful experience of the 'quality' (I use 
> the term loosely) of exports from Visio in non-M$ formats 
> (i.e. anything portable). My preferred method would now be to 
> create a PDF from Visio and import that into FrameMaker. But 
> then, I work on a Mac...

Yeah, Visio's export filters -- especially EPS -- have sucked for a long
time. 

I use PDF for practically all my Visio drawings. For one thing, I create
multiple related drawings, such as call flow diagrams, in a single
multi-page Visio file. I can print that to a multi-page PDF with a
custom page size, and then import each page of the PDF (at 100%) into my
FM doc. Print a new PDF from Visio, and all the diagrams in FM are
updated. Sweet. :-) 

As an alternative, Visio's PNG export seems to be pretty decent (at
least in Visio 2003). 

Also, I've played a little with Visio's Save As Web Page command,
choosing VML as the graphics format, and that looks pretty slick. My
multi-page drawings ended up as a set of VML (vector markup language)
files with an HTML frameset wrapper that provided navigation, pan and
zoom, search, etc. 

There are lots of options for Save As Web Page -- for vector output, SVG
is another option. If you're on Windows (sorry, Steve <g>) and want to
put Visio drawings on line, it's worth looking into. 

Richard 


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Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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