Convert Visio 2003 (PC) documents to PDFs

Aug 15, '05 07:42:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I occasionally find myself using Visio 2003 on my PC (via Remote Desktop Connection from my Powerbook, of course). Since no one else in the office really uses Visio, I've come up with this quick work-around to turn my Visio files into PDFs. The neat thing is that this should work for just about any app that uses a propriatary image format...

  1. Open your document in Visio.
  2. Save it as a PNG (this will probably work with other image formats, too). Make sure you save it with a decent resolution -- I've been using 256x256 pixels/inch. That's usually more than enough, plus it's an easy number to remember.
  3. Move the PNG over to your Mac using your favourite method of file transfer.
  4. Open the PNG in Preview, and choose File -> Save As.
  5. Give the file a name, change the format to PDF, and click Save.
You can also choose File -> Print -> Print to PDF in Preview, but this will fit your PDF to a piece of paper. Since most of my Visios don't end up getting printed, that method just has the effect of adding whitespace to the borders of my document.

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