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A
Anonymous
May 4, 2011
Answered

Visio drawings embedded in Word documents don't convert correctly

  • May 4, 2011
  • 5 replies
  • 32359 views

Hi,

Windows XP, with all available patches.

Word 2007, with all available patches.

Visio 2002, with all available patches.

Acrobat X pro (trial at this point) with all available patches.

I have some long word documents that have many visio drawings embedded within them.  When I try and convert the word document to a pdf using the Adobe Acrobat tab that gets installed within  Word, I find that the document gets converted without any errors, but when I view the document, some of the Visio drawings are not displayed correctly.  In particular, the arrows at the ends of many of the connectors are missing.

Is this a known problem?  Is there a reasonable workaround available?

I have tried severl other PDF creators and they work with no problem - the Adobe Acrobat is the only converter I have tried that exhibits this behaviour, and at the moment it is preventing me from buying the full version.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer AbhigyanModi

Not to get anyone's hopes up but ...

Acrobat 10.1.4 was just released and a quick test against a known bad document (Word 2010 DOCX file with one diagram created in Visio 2007 that was inserted - not copied/pasted - and which included mutliple lines terminating in arrowheads) has been successful. This is using the Office PDF plug-in.

This document above is what I supplied to an Adobe representative to help troubleshoot the problem.

The release notes for this update appear not to mention that this issue is fixed (not that we have a bug number or anything to track it by).

Can anyone independently confirm that this problem is resolved?

I'm using Windows 7 (which was updated at the same time BTW), Word 2010, Visio 2007 and the latest Acrobat X.


Yes, this issue has been specifically addressed in 10.1.4. Thanks for raising the issue and providing test collatoral.

5 replies

M
mugg326
Participant
May 30, 2012

I don't know how many of you have gotten closure on this yet, but I have had a similar problem with vanishing arrowheads in Visio drawings embedded in Word documents which are then converted to PDF. The arrowheads do not go missing until the PDF is generated.

I am running XP SP3, Visio 2003, Word 2007, and Acrobat 9.5 Pro, with all current updates as of this posting.

I have found that the Visio drawings in question all originated as AutoCAD drawings exported to WMF format.

My solution to this problem is the following workflow:

1) Open the WMF with Visio.

2) Tweak the drawing:

       a) Ungroup the shape.

       b) Select All and align left. This resets all text to its original alignment in the AutoCAD drawing.

       c) Text boxes are are often unnecessarily large; shrink any of these down.

       d) Click File->Page Setup->Page Size and select 'Size to fit drawing contents'.

3) Save the drawing as a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

4) Close the drawing.

5) Open the SVG and drag/drop or copy/paste the drawing into the Word document.

6) Generate a PDF.

When migrating documents from Word to FrameMaker, part of my workflow is to round-trip the raw .fm file through an XML-based .MIF format and back again, in order to get rid of any hidden MS Word garbage. I suspect that since .SVG is also XML-based, round-tripping the Visio drawing through .SVG format accomplishes the same thing for my embedded drawings. I have never had the problem in question with Visio files embedded in FrameMaker documents, perhaps because they are all embedded in .SVG format.

I can't show you any objective evidence other than reproducible results.

Hope this helps!

Engineering Writer
Engineering Writer
Participant
July 31, 2012

I also want to confirm that some, but not all, Visio arrowsheads become missing from Acrobat X PDFs (Win 7 Pro, Acrobat X Pro, Word 2007, Visio 2007). For a given drawing, it appears that an inserted EMF or EMZ and an embedded Visio all behave the same.

I'm hoping that Adobe observes that it's a continuing problem and gives it attention.

M
main44menu
Participating Frequently
August 14, 2012

Not to get anyone's hopes up but ...

Acrobat 10.1.4 was just released and a quick test against a known bad document (Word 2010 DOCX file with one diagram created in Visio 2007 that was inserted - not copied/pasted - and which included mutliple lines terminating in arrowheads) has been successful. This is using the Office PDF plug-in.

This document above is what I supplied to an Adobe representative to help troubleshoot the problem.

The release notes for this update appear not to mention that this issue is fixed (not that we have a bug number or anything to track it by).

Can anyone independently confirm that this problem is resolved?

I'm using Windows 7 (which was updated at the same time BTW), Word 2010, Visio 2007 and the latest Acrobat X.

R
renzed
Participant
June 30, 2011

I can also confirm this behavior, using:

  • Win XP
  • Word 2007
  • Visio 2007
  • Acrobat 9 Standard

Thanks.

Kurt48
Kurt48
Participating Frequently
August 9, 2011

We had the same issue in the latest version of Acrobat X.  The save as pdf feature in MS word works fine.

A
Adobe Employee
ApoorvM
Adobe Employee
June 6, 2011

Hi,

I tried to replicate this using the mentioned environment/procedure .. but could not replicate . One of the converted files is attached herewith .

Please share some files for which you faced such issue .

Thanks,

Apoorv

N
nieroster1
Participating Frequently
June 6, 2011

Hello,

I'm sorry but I cannot find any possibility to attach a file to a posting.

N
nieroster1
Participating Frequently
June 8, 2011

Ok.. Can you please try using acrobat.com to send the files.

Thanks,

Apoorv


Well isn't this adobe.com??? If you want me to help you, you have to be more specific.

If Adobe is not able to establish a forum (like any other forum in the web) where you can attach files, I'm terribly sorry. You have to sort out things without me then.

Regards,

Franz

S
swyve
Participant
June 4, 2011

I can also confirm the behaviour using

Vista, Word 2007, Visio 2007 Pro, and Acrobat X pro (trial)

(all patches applied).

I am embedding Visio drawings as .EMFs. The missing arrowheads seem quite random; roughly 20% are missing.


It is discouraging me from purchasing Acrobat X; I like the graphics, but exporting a PDF from Word retains the hyperlinks and all the arrowheads.

V
Adobe Employee
Vishal@PDF
Adobe Employee
June 6, 2011

Thanks for using Acrobat.

We would definitely like to investigate the problem which you people are facing in converting Word documents having embedded Visio drawings. Can you please provide some sample Word documents and converted PDF files to us for trying out?

You can upload these either on acrobat.com or some other file server site.

Thanks,

Vishal Gupta

Adobe.

N
nieroster1
Participating Frequently
May 26, 2011

Hi,

I can confirm the behaviour using

Windows 7 x64

Word 2010

Viso 2010

Acrobat X

I would be thankful if this could be fixed soon.

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