Thankfully, Summer of Code students Eilidh Mc.Īdam and Fridrich Strba implemented support for opening. The format is commonly used for infrastructure and architecture documentation and planningвЂ”and less commonly, for user interface design and planning. VSD format) diagrams for a pretty long time.

Open source tools haven't been able to open Visio (. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser- known open source tool for converting Visio. В®' department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you're a big- time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently.įrom the 'Alternatives to Microsoft. Please feel free to ask questions, if something isn't clear.Using Visio in an open source environment. Start with this tutorial, which I hope can help people to make a decision on their own, for which is the best way for their particular situation:Īnd it will guide you to instructions for whichever way you decide to use.

I would say for this project, the deciding factor will be how much detail you want in the result. But basically, you have a choice of either 'manually' tracing, using Inkscape's Pen/Bezeir tool, or auto-tracing using Path menu > Trace Bitmap (or some other auto-trace engine). I've written a series of tutorials about how to convert a raster image to vector paths, because there's a lot of information to consider, in various different situations. It's for auto-tracing, and as I recall, it's fairly cursory.

In addition to the manual info which Maestral provided, I think there's a brief tutorial in the Help menu > Tutorials > Tracing. Oooohh, you're making the physical stencils.

How to use inkscape to create stencils