DOCBOOK-APPS: Visio Vector Graphics -> DocBook XSL

["Rankine, Alastair J (Alastair)" <arankine at avaya dot com>]

Hi all,

What's the consensus on the best way to include vector graphics from a Visio (2002) diagram in a PDF output file? Assume DocBook XSL 1.50.0 for now, and hosted on Windows/cygwin. Free tools preferred.

As I see it, the supported graphics formats depend on your FO processor. I have access to:

- FOP 0.20.3 (which is finally of a standard that gives me good quality documents, minus the graphics :) It seems the only support for vector graphics is through SVG.
- PassiveTeX. Supports PDF (only?) for vector graphics.

As a secondary goal I'd like this process to be scriptable in some way so that it can be invoked from my makefiles.

So anyway I need to convert the Visio diagram into either SVG or PDF.  Here's a summary of the tools I've found so far to generate either of these. SVG is preferred because it's new and cool.


- SVGMaker (www.svgmaker.com)

This is a printer driver which outputs SVG. Looks like a good tool - the output is great using the Adobe SVG viewer. Unfortunately:
 a) it is a printer driver, hence unscriptable (or not?)
 b) produces compressed svg by default, which need to be uncompressed so that FOP (actually Batik) can understand it
 c) FOP generates an invalid PDF (at least on the images I tried). Maybe I need to upgrade Batik?
 d) (minor annoyance only) On my test images it generated a folder full of wierd little 3x2 pixel bitmaps. This maybe had something to do with the Visio stencils I was using though.


- SVGExport (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~tardif/SVGExport.html)

Couldn't get it to work with my Visio 2002. Also has many limitations (see webpage).


- ps2web, ps2vector (http://www.square1.nl/index.htm)

These look promising: commandline tools to convert postscript into SVG. It's relatively expensive (compared to the price of Visio itself!) at $149. I haven't tried it, but I'm worried: this tool is obviously at the mercy of Visio's postscript export functions (more below).


- Visio 2003(?)

I'm sure I came across a page at microsoft.com which said "the next version of Visio _will_ support SVG natively". Maybe I was just dreaming?


- Visio EPS export / ghostscript eps2pdf

You can export EPS from Visio, then using the eps2pdf converter in ghostscript convert to PDF. Unfortunately I was never able to get this to work (tried ghostscript on cygwin and linux, can't remember the versions).

I tried many different options in the EPS export function of Visio, and it would either confuse the eps2pdf tool, or the pdf viewer, or produce a blank image.


- Adobe Postscript printer driver / ghostscript eps2pdf

There are some instructions here (http://www.cs.uq.oz.au/~emmerik/visioeps.html) on how to convert Visio files to EPS for use in LaTeX, and I assume the same principles apply for PassiveTeX (bear in mind I am a TeX ignoramus!)

It was a few weeks ago that I tried this, but I could not get it to work.


So that's it - any others that I have missed?

Comments appreciated!


One last thing: SVG is not a supported format attribute for the imagedata tag in the DocBook DTD (4.2RC1), should this be raised as an RFE?