[texhax] PDF to EMF?

Ivan Griffin ivan at skynet.ie
Fri Apr 29 10:55:46 CEST 2011


Hi Steven,

Unfortunately the quality of the EMF output varies.

I have had to most success in saving SVG from InkScape (its native 
format), and then converting this to EMF with Visio.

The EMF exports from InkScape suffered from a number of issues:
* size (as I mentioned, I ended up with 10MB EMFs which were unwieldy)
* font / text placement issues

WMFs didn't fair much better.

Before generating SVGs that Visio could work well with, I'm pretty sure I 
had to use File->Vacuum Defs in InkScape, and I may have saved from it as 
either "Plain SVG" or "Optimized SVG", in preference to "InkScape 
SVG"....

I really should have documented this better at the time, but it was a 
once-off need.

Nonetheless, with a little playing around with InkScape and Visio, I was 
able to figure out a flow that generated high quality EMFs effectively 
from TikZ source.

Hope this helps,


Best Regards,
Ivan


On Fri, 29 Apr 2011, Steven Woody wrote:

> Hi, Ivan
>
> Thanks.  If using Inkscape, instead of tizk, you can save your graph
> directly in EMF, right? So why you bother to save it in SVG then open
> it in Visio?
>
> Best Regards,
> narke
>
> On 29 April 2011 00:23, Ivan Griffin <ivan at skynet.ie> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Steven,
>>
>> I've done this (crudely) with a convoluted workflow.  Apologies in
>> advance, as I can't remember the exact details.
>>
>> I used preview.sty to generate the TikZ picture to an appropriately sized
>> PDF image.  Then I used InkScape to open the PDF and save it as SVG.
>>
>> I then opened the SVG in Visio 2010, and pasted it into MS Word as some
>> form of metafile.  This for me was a key step, as the InkScape EMF/WMFs
>> weren't perfect.
>>
>> Somewhere along the chain I ended up with ferociously large SVGs (10MB was
>> not uncommon) and I can't remember now what trick/tool I used to simplify
>> the SVG back down.
>>
>> But this route has worked well for me.
>>
>> I think I might occasionally have had to fix textboxes in the end
>> metafiles, but in general they were okay.
>>
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Ivan
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Steven Woody wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've drawn a lot of tikz pictures (resulted in PDF formats after
>>> running pdflatex on them).  Now, for some reason I have to use them on
>>> a MS word document. I tried pdf2picture, some text looks ugly, maybe a
>>> kind of font problem.  I also tried the Total PDF Converter, the
>>> resulted quality is okay, but the program is not friendly to use in
>>> Windows 7.
>>>
>>> Do you have any suggestion on these kind of tools?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Life is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect nonexistence
>>>     -- Schopenhauer
>>>
>>> narke
>>> public key at http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371 (narkewoody at gmail.com)
>>>
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>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Life is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect nonexistence
>     -- Schopenhauer
>
> narke
> public key at http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371 (narkewoody at gmail.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
> Mailing list archives: http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/
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