Initial support for Visio files lands to LibreOffice

A mere month after official start of Google Summer of Code 2011 first public version of libvisio is available and makes it possible to open Visio files in LibreOffice.

Right now the library is somehwat simplistic, but already supports a number of geometric primitives and some fills (flat and gradient). Some elements are currently rendered in wireframe. Here is an example of a real-life network diagram created in Visio and opened in LibreOffice from Git:

The work is done by Eilidh McAdam mentored by Fridrich Strba of LibreOffice team with help and advice from truly yours re-lab team who continuously improve OLE Toy to assist analysis of VSD. Eilidh doesn’t blog a lot about her project, nevertheless don’t hesitate to thank her.

If you are willing to test it, you need both source code (actually, it’s best to build from Git), libwpd, libwpg and writerperfect. The latter should be built with --with-libvisio option to enable building of vsd2odg utility. However if you are even braver, you can build LibreOffice from Git and open VSD files directly.

Given the current pace, it’s quite possible that by the “pencils down” time (end of August) the code will be in a very good shape, so you will be able to open a lot of diagrams created with Microsoft Visio exactly the way they are supposed to be viewed. Saving them back to VSD or VDX will have to wait though.

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