View Single Post
The problem with all the solutions I've seen to this so far is that at the end, you end up with a rasterized image, which doesn't scale smoothly and you lose a lot of detail. I've found a way to keep the images vectorial, but it's gonna cost...

I am using Visio 2002 in an XP VM, but I believe the same process with 2003 or others should be just fine.

Create a new document in Visio and populate it with some of the stencil objects you want. I'm using HP, NetApp and IBM shapes for my testing. Not too many because the process seems to flake out on huge docs.

Save As .emf (enhanced metafile) or .wmf (windows metafile) from Visio.

Open this new file in Illustrator on the Mac, your shapes should come through the process. Select the object in Illustrator, copy it with cmd-C and paste it into OmniGraffle with cmd-V. Dragging it doesn't seem to work very well.

A ghetto way to do the same task is to use OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice) to act as your middleman rather than Illustrator, however OpenOffice seems to rasterize the images as it imports them into its "drawing" app, which is completely pointless IMHO.

This process has worked really well with most stencil sets I've tried, however it's not 100% perfect yet. You might have to tweak a few things here and there to make your stencils come over.

Now, does anyone know the legality of me taking these stencils and uploading them to Graffletopia? I'm guess it's "Ill-" and that I should ask both Graffletopia and the specific hardware manufacturer first.