Re: dia file exchange

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Hubert Figuiere wrote:

> According to Cyrille Chepelov <chepelov@calixo.net>:
>> 
>> (dia's native file format is gzipped XML; it's quite easy to
>> parse. However, I'm afraid XML is not the silver bullet described in the
>> trade press, and dia's file being XML won't help loading them into Visio
>> much, unless you're ready to write a dia-to-Visio filter in a scripting
>> language able to drive Visio, if such a thing exists).
> 
> If you have Visio and know OLE programming, you can do that on Windows.
> There is currently a company that does this for their own diagramming
> software and provide a web service to translate Visio files to their.
> 
> If that gives ideas...

Now that I hadn't considered.  A quick Google search tells us:

Actrix 2000 supposedly has conversion support, but they're kinda quiet
about it.  External sources
<URL:http://www.design-drawing.com/visio/V2AXlate.htm> indicate that they
do pretty well.  Is perchance the Actrix file format known?

SmartDraw <URL:http://www.smartdraw.com/> claims to be able to import Visio
files.  It can write WMF.

EDSA <URL:www.edsa.com> imports VIsio, too.

Visio is supposed to start using XML.  I'll believe that when I see it.

Do you remember which company it was that offered translation?

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I    | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it."    |   of Westfield
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire   | Chaos Berserker of Khorne