Re: floor plan shapes

[Valek Filippov <frob gnome org>]

> I wonder - I have found out that you are the author of vsdump tool - are
> you still working on it? The version of it I have seems to be several
> years old and is not able to open some of the files (catalyst 4000).
It's more or less discontinued now.
For file introspection there are to other tools as part of the re-lab
project activity:
OLEToy and colupatr  (https://gitorious.org/re-lab).

These tools do not dump stencils though.

There is a libvisio
(http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/libvisio/) library
which gives two tools:
vsd2xhtml and vsd2odg. XHTML is used to pack multiple pages into one
file (one SVG per page), because current SVG spec doesn't support
multipage files.
libvisio would be able to convert "native" stencils shapes (which
vsdump doesn't dump), but at the moment it doesn't have a tool to
convert stencil itself.
It shouldn't be difficult to make one, just dev team had no time to do it.
Hence if someone can copy stencil elements to the page (sometimes VSS
files are done this way, but it's not very usual) in Visio for you,
libvisio would do way better job than vsdump.
libvisio is also used by LibreOffice 3.5 and Calligra 2.5.x to open VSD files.
It would be nice if somebody make an intermediate code to hook it to Dia.
(There is an information on compiling libvisio at the end of an
article  here: 
http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-ultimate-quest-of-bringing-visio-support-to-libreoffice).

Cisco's stencils mostly made of WMF/EMF, so vsdump should be ok to
extract them. But next you will need to deal with metafiles.
WMF is reasonably bad supported by libwmf. Probably the best free
EMF(+) parser is available in LibreOffice, but I'm not sure if one can
export to SVG with current version (there is a GSoC project now to
improve export, not sure about the scope).

> I will try to recreate your catalyst 2950 shapes, let's see how far I get.
Back in 2007 adding some of those sheets to Dia had been placing my
homebox (512Mb of RAM at that time) on its knee.
Probably that was because of sub-optimal SVGs.
So I suspect that usage of "SVG cleaner" tool
(http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/introducing-svg-cleaner)
could significantly improve results.

Back to Cat4000 issue with vsdump.
Could you name the file to try? Not very likely I will release an
update for vsdump, but issues with this file could mean something
interesting for oletoy/libvisio.

-- 
Cheers,
Valek