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Subject:RE: Exported Visio drawing - quality problem From:KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 3 Aug 2001 16:05:13 -0400
I work in FrameMaker and have only Visio Technical 5.0
from a few years ago, so maybe things have changed, but...
WMF - generally small files, crisp display and printing,
and resizable. So far, after a brief scare, we've
avoided having anybody at the company using FM on
any platform except windoze. Can anybody comment
on how well WMF is received on UNIX?
PNG - I found that SOMETIMES it works, and sometimes it
doesn't. Never fails entirely, but can give
unexpectedly large files sizes, can screw up the
color (i.e., my favorite pale-gray background, that
looks fine in Visio, looks fine in FrameMaker,
turns into a spotty yellow in PDF and print...
don't ask me...) and sometimes I get pieces of
a drawing re-arranged, or extra lines appearing,
and they carry over into PDF and print.
EPS - I have found that EPS output from Visio looks good
in Frame, but often causes creation of PDF to fail.
This may be fixed in more recent versions of Visio.
If I bring Visio-generated EPS into Illustrator and
export as EPS from there, the problem goes away.
Enormous file sizes, though.
The simple vector and fill information that WMF can
convey perfectly in less than 100K usually takes up
three-to-ten megabytes as an EPS. Put 40 or 50 of those
in a document and watch your IT department go ballistic
about your server usage and watch your PDFs get kinda
unwieldy for downloading...
Yet, Dov Isaacs and other FM gurus keep insisting that
EPS is the format-of-choice for illustrations in any
doc that's headed for PDF. Certainly, Distilling to
PDF does strip off a LOT of the bulk.
AI - Well, obviously, Illustrator produces pretty good .ai
files, but oddly enough, FrameMaker hasn't been too
happy about accepting them from either Visio or Illustrator
(another Adobe product)... but then I was scared away
from using .ai when I had FM 5.5.6. Maybe it's ok now
with FM6? Somebody else can say.
CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile - I forget why I stopped
using that format. Can somebody remind me? I know I
never downloaded any plug-in viewer from Micrographx,
but I used to be able to make some kinda use of CGM. Hmmm.
SVG - don't know. I wonder how well it gets incorporated from
FrameMaker into PDF, and how well an unconnected user
will do (i.e., someone who is setting up equipment in
an environment where he can't access the Internet and
can't access a viewer/plug-in that he didn't know he'd
be needing) trying to read my installation guide as a
PDF off our CD.
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