Microsoft Visio save as EPS

February 8, 2008 2:04 pm GMT-0700 | In Tech

I wrote the following procedure on 2008.02.08:

To convert a Microsoft Visio document to EPS without losing scalable vector format (and without installing 3rd-party software…):

  1. Install Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office programs (only available for Office 2007?).
  2. Save Visio document as PDF in Visio 2007.
  3. Convert PDF to Postscript (.ps) with pdf2ps utility.
  4. Open .ps file with gsview, and select File -> PS to EPS, be sure to check “Automatically calculate Bounding Box”.

Now you have an EPS file to be embedded into your LaTeX document. Many other converting methods exist, see also Visio and EPS.

Here are some updates (edited on 2009.01.30):

  1. In theory, you should be able to open that saved PDF directly in gsview and convert to EPS, but gsview either crashes or refuses to accept the PDF.
  2. In some cases, e.g. when you compile LaTeX directly to PDF using pdflatex, you just need a PDF figure with correct size. In that case, you can set the document size in Visio: File -> Page Setup -> Page Size (tab) -> Size to fit drawing contents, and then save the Visio document to PDF, which will then be in correct size ready to be embedded into LaTeX.
  3. To create a Postscript file, you don’t necessarily need to save as PDF and convert to .ps using pdf2ps. All you need to do is to use a postscript printer (most modern printers are, including most PDF writers) and print to file. That would create a postscript file which can then be passed to gsview and converted to EPS by adding a bounding box. Note: this is in fact a generic way of converting anything to (vector-format) EPS/PDF with bounding box.

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6 Comments »

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  1. Chinese characters safe?

    Comment by fishy — February 8, 2008 6:29 pm GMT-0700 #

  2. Chinese looks ok except there seems to be no anti-aliasing… Personally I don’t have Chinese in Visio so whatever… btw, the reason that visio removed save as EPS feature seems to be lack of international support

    Comment by atppp — February 8, 2008 6:36 pm GMT-0700 #

  3. Microsoft Visio save as EPS in Vista

    (1) Add printer, select Generic->MS color publisher
    (2) In Visio, print file to any.ps
    (3) Use GSview to convert any.ps to any.eps

    Enjoy!

    Comment by Juneshark — November 10, 2009 10:02 pm GMT-0700 #

  4. Just wanted to let you know that its not showing up properly on the BlackBerry Browser (I have a Pearl). Anyway, I am now on the RSS feed on my laptop, so thanks!

    Comment by Harry Lynch — April 27, 2010 8:18 pm GMT-0700 #

  5. for Microsoft Visio 2003, I found the best thing is to save as WMF, then open in Open-Office Draw utility and export to EPS.

    Works ok, but you may have to play a bit with the page settings in Draw (margins, etc)

    Comment by Kfir — August 20, 2010 11:55 pm GMT-0700 #

  6. another tip: before exporting to EPS, select the image you opened, and then export and check “Selection” at the bottom of the window. This will save just the image, without the paper margins, and could result in a bettter EPS

    Comment by Kfir — August 20, 2010 11:58 pm GMT-0700 #

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