Hello,

i would like to convert Microsoft Visio's Stencils to images (i dont cate about format ex. png, gif, tiff, bmp, jpg etc), in order to use them to another program. Visio has VERY VERY VERY good and interesting stencils but cannot be used as images. Am i right? Do you know any program (freeware or shareware i dont mind) to convert the stencils to images??

Thank you very much,

Looking forward hearing from you,

John

[jacobss]

If you have Parallels this is pretty easy.

Open the Stencil in Visio loaded in Parallels and do a screen grab using the "Shift + Apple +4" combo. A cross hair will appear, put it on your start point and drag it across to the end point. It will save to your desktop as a picture#.png, bring that into OmniGraffle, and save it off as a stencil set if you wish, or as a single item.

If you have a lot of items it is slow, but it can get a critical item from one format to the other.

HTH

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.

[KeynoteKen]

I once used this path to get things converted to a vector format.

Set up a new printer in Windows. I can't remember the exact steps, but you want the output to go to a postcript file instead of to a printer.

Then, you can take this .eps or .ps doc into almost any app on the mac (there's a short wait while it converts either one of those to PDF for use by the app).

That doesn't require any additional software BUT it does require you have access to add printers (which some companies don't allow).