Lines drawn incorrectly in embedded visio object

[Jay]

I have a visio drawing embedded in a word doc. Everything looks ok when I
open the visio document but when seen from the word doc, one of the lines
that should be dashed is drawn solid. Zooming in to 500% shows it clearly as
solid and not dashed. If I print it out to a pdf it is also solid. Identical
copies of the line look ok.

Visio Professional 2002-SP-2 10.0.5110

Application name Microsoft Word
Version 10.0
Build 6612
Application path C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10
Language English (United States)
System language designation English (U.K.)
Active printer Acrobat Distiller on NE04:

Windows XP prof.

Is this a know bug? Any workarounds?

Thanks,,

Jay

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

You can call it a bug, but we call it a design compromise. When you embed a
Visio document in Word, Visio has to generate a metafile image to be used in
the Word document. This is the image that you view and print. The problem
is that GDI (the Windows rendering surface) does not have native support for
dashed lines. To construct the metafile image, every dash in the dashed
line must be treated as its own line segment. This would seriously bloat
your Word file and give the printer fits. Visio has some internal logic
that converts dashed lines to solid lines if an image gets too complex. I
believe that we relaxed the threshold a bit in Visio 2003, but the overall
recommendation would be to reduce the complexity of the drawing or get rid
of the dashed lines completely.

 

[Jay]

Mark,

Thanks for the reply.

I hope it does get fixed and soon. All our diagrams are full of dashed,
dotted and patterned lines & objects and we've never had a problem with
windows or printers coping with them but we'd like to include them in word
docs and it's a real problem for us. We don't have any choice but to use
dashed lines, they are in the standard we use for certain diagrams. Could
you perhaps have this as a parameter in the options? Is it already there in
the registry perhaps?

Thanks,

Jay

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

We made some adjustments in Visio 2003 to allow more complex drawings with
dashed patterns. We also added a registry setting that provides
customization of the threshold. Unfortunately, there are no plans to make
similar changes to Visio 2002.

--
Mark Nelson
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Jay]

Ok, well upgrading isn't the end of the world

Thanks for your help.

Jay.