FAQ

  1. How to fix the crazy routing problem in MS Visio?
  2. How to export PDF figures with MS Visio?
  3. How to crop blank margins of a PDF figure?
  1. How to fix the crazy routing problem in Microsoft Visio?
    Microsoft Visio is one of good drawing tools that offers numerous kinds of diagrams. Unfortunately, there is an unintentionly feature that might annoy you in the 2007 version. You might or might not face with this issue. That happens whenever you drop a certain drawing shapes onto existing shapes, the drawing canvas might be messed up. Most of the shapes, e.g., existing and the new ones, crazily and uncontrolledly jump around. Work-around: Microsoft has not informed this issue, or probably not realized it. The reason is that the feature "Move other shapes away on drop" is turned on as default for a newly created Visio file. AFAIK, there is no option to turn this feature off for the whole Visio environment. This can only be done per Visio file, per sub-page, or per shape. The following steps are only applied on an opened Visio file: (1) go to File > Page Setup, (2) choose tab "Layout and Routing", (3) uncheck the aforementioned feature. That affect not only current pages but also newly created sub-pages. To setup per shape, right-click at the shape and choose "Behavior" in the context menu. You can find there a lot of relevant properties on the "Placement" tab.
  2. How to export PDF figures with MS Visio?
    Figures in Visio: LaTeX provides a good mean for publishing regarding high quality. The most popular graphic file formats well-processed by (pdf)LaTeX are EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) and PDF, i.e., vector graphics. Others (also popular) graphic formats such as TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WMF, EMF, etc., often needs further converting steps to produce vector graphics, somehow, with doubtable quality. Visio is among good drawing tools nowadays, but Visio could not handle (aka editing and saving) those LaTex-supported vector graphics.
    • Using MS "Save As PDF"
      • Microsoft had developed a nice feature for the Office suite, namely, "Save As PDF", which can help end-users saving mostly all kinds of Office documents in the popular Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Therefore, an additional Postcript/PDF printer is no longer needed for the MS Office Suite, but others. This feature is provided as a separated package from Microsoft Office site. Note that this add-on offers no option to enforce font embedding.
    • Using PDF printers: One cheap (i.e., less $$$) alternative is to use some sorts of PostScript/PDF printer
    • Using converters: Save Visio diagrams as vector graphics in terms of SVG/EMF/WMF files, then use some sorts of converter to produce EPS/PDF
    • Using Adobe Acrobat: Adobe Acrobat suite is too pricey but much better with a lot of advanced features, including a PDF printer/exporter.
  3. How to crop blank margins of a PDF figure?
    The resulting PDF figure of aforementioned methods often has many blank margins. There are some existing white-space crop methods, e.g., by using PDFCrop, a Visio macro, or Adobe Acrobat suite (Menu > Document > Crop Page, or simply Ctrl+Shift+T, then choose Remove White Margins, or justify your desired crop space). Another solution for cropping the redundant space is to use "pdfcrop" utility including in various TeX distributions such as MikTeX or TexLive
    Last updated: 08.11.2009