Comments on: Extracting Images from Visio and Inserting Them in Indesign

By: Vik

Vik — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:04:58 +0000

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.

By: Alfred

Alfred — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:22:52 +0000

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.

By: Extracting Images from Visio and Inserting Them in Indesign | I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson | I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:15:52 +0000

[...] Extracting Images from Visio and Inserting Them in Indesign | I’d Rather Be Writing – To…. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

By: Visio Guy

Visio Guy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:43:23 +0000

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!

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:36:16 +0000

Jason, if you have the Creative Design Suite, it’s not that difficult. Without it, yes.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:35:52 +0000

I agree — vectors look professional. Pixelated, rasterized images (such as those blown-up from Microsoft Clipart) don’t look so good.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:34:59 +0000

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?

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:40:16 +0000

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.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:07:56 +0000

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.

By: Visio Guy

Visio Guy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:52:57 +0000

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