Extracting Images from Visio and Inserting Them in Indesign
June 17th, 2009 | Posted in blog 10 Comments »
Have you ever tried to find cool graphics for conceptual diagrams but find yourself coming up empty handed? Sure, sites like istockphoto.com make icons available inexpensively. But no matter what the cost, if you work for a company you still have to submit an expense request, get it approved by management, and then subtract the cost from a dwindling budget. It’s a pain in the neck, and you’re usually in a time crunch, right?
Never fear, Visio is here. Visio has tons of great-looking icons. And they’re all vectors, so they resize seamlessly. There’s only one problem: they’re stuck in Visio.
With a little manipulation, however, you can unfree them from Visio and keep them looking sharp for insertion in InDesign. You need a power app (namely, Adobe Illustrator), but that’s it.
To extract images from Visio and insert them into InDesign, here’s what I do:
- Open Visio and find the icon you want. Search for “secretary” or “design” and you’ll find the standard bald blue man. Select and copy the image.
Copy the image from Visio
- Open Adobe Illustrator, create a new document, and paste in the Visio icon. You’ll notice that each of the sixteen million layers for the image suddenly appears.
In Illustrator, you can see see the layers
- Right-click the icon and choose Ungroup.
- Now here you can make a few adjustments to the icon, mostly removing things or changing colors. On the Illustrator toolbar, the black arrow allows you to move things, and the white arrow allows you to distort or reshape things. The white arrow is handy, for example, if you want to squish in the line that mysteriously extends from the head of the icon.
Modify the image
- When you’re finished, go to File > Save As and save it as an Adobe Illustrator (.ai) file type.
Save it as an .ai file
- In Adobe Indesign, go to File > Place and insert the image. You can still resize it and the vector properties of the image are retained, so you won’t see the jagged edges. In other words, Indesign allows you to embed the image as a vector, rather than rasterizing it and having it become pixilated.
Edges still look sharp in InDesign
If it’s absolutely necessary, you can convert it to a GIF, but the edges will look jagged. Open up the file in Photoshop and go to Image > Mode. Make sure RGB color and 8 bit are selected. Now save it as a GIF file or a Photoshop (.psd) file. The edges will be a bit jagged, but as long as you don’t resize it, the edges won’t be too bad.
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Tags: diagrams, graphics, illustration, illustrator, indesign, Technical Writing, visio
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Hi Tom,
You might be interested to know that Visio has an .SVG export option (since version 2003, I believe)
This might work better when trying to go between Visio and the Adobe world. I usually have less-than-desired results when copying/pasting between the Microsoft and Adobe world.
Interestingly, the nicely-drawn shapes in Visio–like the bald blue dude you used in the example above–were drawn in Illustrator (or something similar), then imported into Visio via the .SVG format.
Cheers,
- Chris
Thanks for the tip about the svg export option. In playing around with that, I see that only Illustrator can open an svg file, not Indesign or Photoshop. I didn’t notice any difference between copying and pasting between Visio and Illustrator and exporting from Visio as an svg and opening it in Illustrator. What kind of problems should I be watching out for?
Looking at your screen shots above, I saw a whole bunch of selected shapes, which looked to me like gradient fills had possibly been broken into thin strips.
I see this is often when I paste things as metafiles, then ungroup them. It seems as if metafiles don’t fully understand or support gradients. (But I don’t know the full/official story on this.)
I thought that svg would support gradients better. Looking again at your screen shots, I’m not 100% sure that I was seeing broken-down gradient strips after all.
There do seem to be too many items, though!
Love posts like these on Visio and Illustrator. Vector images are extremely useful and flexible resources for the tech writer more so when you can use them in printed deliverables. Convenient, scalable graphics.
I agree — vectors look professional. Pixelated, rasterized images (such as those blown-up from Microsoft Clipart) don’t look so good.
Nice post. I have never heard about such a thing ever before. This seems to be very difficult job and is very inserting too. I liked the idea of extracting images.
Jason, if you have the Creative Design Suite, it’s not that difficult. Without it, yes.
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Extracting images visio and inserting them in Indesign seems very interesting. This job mostly is done by technocrats and is a very difficult and brilliant job done. Nice explanation mate.
Great post, quite informative.
Hi Tom.
I’m sorry to posting you comments to old tread; but recently I’ve found 3rd party plug-in supporting both inDesign and Photoshop and SVG files (at InDesignSecrets if it important). Maybe you’ll find this information useful as well. The product named SVG Kit for Adobe Creative Suite, and located at http://svg.scand.com
I’ve tried it at my mac and it seems it works: SVG images now available in InDesign as graphics.