Visio stencils & Linux
At least a year ago when I needed to draw a diagram of a network and a server setup I was disappointed to learn that there is not a single Linux application including Dia and Kivio that is capable of using/importing Visio stencils. It’s not that Dia and Kivio have terrible stencils. It’s just that Visio has so much better or more beautiful stencils. Today I wanted to make a quick network diagram and did some googling to see if anything had changed for the better. The answer is no :-( I did find Ian Redfern’s efforts to reverse engineer Visio’s file format and Valek Filippov’s vsdump utility. Hopefully these guys can find the time and get assistance from the Community to help them succeed. That would save me from having to download a trial version of Visio for that one diagram per year.
August 26th, 2007 at 14:55
Hej Patrick!
1. Many Visio stencils are not so nice internally — I checked a lot of them to find out that the majority of (ok, network) equipment vendors outsource making VSSes to some companies and take back a bunch of WMFs/EMFs wrapped into VSS file.
2. So far EMF is not quite good supported on Linux, and to be more special Dia doesn’t support it (or even WMF import).
At the moment vsdump can extract WMFs/EMFs (and .ico) from such cheap stencils. So one could be able to convert them into Dia/Kivio sheets of objects with help from some WMF/EMF convertor.
3. I’m close to a public release of my WMF/EMF viewer with ability to save as SVG.
Cheers,
Valek