All,
I was wondering if anyone is doing anything with Visio and FT? I have
d/l
the wonderful ship templates and have started thinking in terms of an FT Map
thing. I know Visio has lots of Microsoft support and they are trying to make
it THE diagramming program. I am just not sure if it is even possible to link
it somehow.
If anyone has ideas on this please reply to me offlist (Or on list I guess if
it is interesting enough that others might want to hear).
I just got it for a project at work and of course my mind is turning to
gaming.
I used Visio to draw the diagrams for my fleet. One the one hand, it's easy to
use. Drawing and editing the ship control graphics doesn't much time at all.
On the other hand, the graphics that it outputs aren't of the highest quality.
Here's an example of a large ship control graphic:
http://www.republic.org/~neal/ft/peg.html
That's a gif image, and although it's not difficult to identify the ship
components, they're fuzzier than I'd like. I'd probably use something
different if these weren't just for my own use.
I'm not a Visio expert, so maybe I'm not saving it in the best possible way,
but I haven't found any obvious problems, either. I import Visio graphics to
FrameMaker all the time and those look just fine, so I'm not sure what the
problem is. If anyone knows the answer, I'd appreciate some pointers.
On Tue, 14 Nov 2000 14:47:39 -0800, Neal Kaplan <nkaplan@viquity.com>
wrote:
> I'm not a Visio expert, so maybe I'm not saving it in the best
I created stencils for Fleet Books 1 and 2 in Visio.
Visio's graphics export functions are not great. That said, the JPEG images I
made of my fleet diagrams came out less fuzzy than your GIF image. MUCH less
fuzzy. And they printed just fine.
There are two tricks you can do. Open up a quality graphics package like
Photoshop (I find Corel Photo-Paint is fine).
Trick 1: copy the entire image in Visio to the clipboard. Paste it into the
graphics package. Use the graphics package to save it.
Trick 2: sometimes trick 1 doesn't work well with images that include text.
Text in Visio does weird stuff. Trick 2 seems to work in all cases. Save the
graphic in Windows Metafile file format. Open the.wmf file with the graphics
program. It preserves the graphics and the text. THEN save it using the
graphics package.
For the record, I still use Visio 4.5. Visio 5 is good, too. Visio 2000, the
official Microsoft version, is incredibly bloated. Files are much bigger and
they take forever to save.