I strongly suggest you to use the OTEditor utility to convert Visio diagrams to EPS. I have been using it for a long time now and I am
very, very happy with the result.
OTEditor is a free program that can be downloaded from www.sourceforge.net/projects/oletex. It is rather simple to install and to use.
Assuming that you have this program installed, this are the steps to make the conversion:
1- Select the diagram in Visio, Powerpoint, etc
2- Copy it into the OTEditor
3- Choose "EPS properties" and give a name (you may also change the size of the
figure)
4- Choose "Convert.." and that's it!
One nice thing is that the generated EPS has a correct bounding box!
Nicolás
Aleksandar Kanchev wrote:
Hey Georg,
thanks a lot for this nice explanation. I figured out yesterday that
using bitmaps (i.e. PNG, JPEG) is not the right way. I actually tried
exporting the drawing into SVG from MS Visio but it was a disaster.
Visio itself was able to recreate the drawing without any problems, but
unfortunately the libraries that came with Fedora 9 couldn't. I also
tried other free tools like inkscape, but none of them could handle the
Visio SVG. So I'm currently using the Adobe Illustrator, I'm importing
the SVG from Visio than I'm exporting it to EPS. It works wonderfully,
the drawing looks to be exactly the same.
Thanks for the link about the Metafile EPS Converter. I don't know how
did I miss that. The automatic convertsion sounds nice, but it's kind of
better if you're using LyX under windows. I'll stick with using the
Illustrator for now.
Thanks,
Aleksandar
Georg Baum wrote:
Aleksandar Kanchev wrote:
Hello list,
whats wrong with LyX and PNG files?
Nothing. PNG files usually work fine.
I draw a diagram in MS Visio, export
Since Visio produces vector graphics it would be better to use a vector
format, e.g. EMF. Then you will not get any scaling problems. See
http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/MetafileToEPSConverter for instructions on
getting good EMF/WMF support in LyX.
it to PNG, open it on LyX 1.5.5 (on Fedora 9). The PNG looks nice in
LyX itself, but when I create a pdf the picture gets over-scaled beyond
the page size. I tried forcing the picture size in lyx but it looked
like it was first over-scaled, then scaled again to the size I gave it
and as a result it looked completely ugly. This seems to be a problem
with PNG files, I tried exporting from MS Visio the same file with the
same size in JPEG and it displayed ok in LyX and the picture wasn't
over-scaled I left it to automatically scale the picture.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a known problem with PNG files?
Could it be fixed? I really don't like JPEG, the diagram looks better in
PNG. The picture size is 14x11,2 cm or 529x423 pixels.
It is the nature of bitmap files that the size is always measured in
pixels,
never in physical length units like cm. Some bitmap formats do allow to
specify a resolution, so that you can relate pixels to physical lengths,
but this setting is usually ignored. In order to get predictable results
you should therefore avoid the setting "Original size" for bitmap
files and
specify a fixed size, either in physical length units or LaTeX variables,
e.g. page width. If you get ugly looking PNGs you are probably not using
pdflatex (which supports PNG directly), and a bad PNG->EPS converter.
Georg
