Publishing Visio Drawings to the Web

ISSN 1441-5585

Software Catalog

Publishing Visio Drawings to the Web

Tony Zilles

In a previous article we discussed how to publish Visio drawings to a Web friendly format.

Web friendly formats are essentially GIF or JPG raster images. These images contain no intelligence and are just variant bitmap formats that are reliably and almost universally supported by the majority of Web browsers in common use.

In that article we referred to a problem discovered when producing a Visio drawing with embedded hyperlinks for Web use.

We found that the hyperlink hotspots on the exported HTML were located lower than and to the left of the designated hot areas. This misalignment is an unsatisfactory error. A check of Visio's own online forum revealed that a number of people have discovered the same problem.

We asked Visio for some help in resolving the problem and received a couple of responses, passed on below together with our findings on testing the solutions.

Solution #1

If the page is too large this could happen. Exactly what the "too large" point is, I couldn't tell you, but I bet you could figure it out pretty quick

DD Findings: Our drawing was based on an A4 sheet, with a collection of fairly basic shapes. Not what we would consider a large drawing by any means. We spent a little time making it smaller but were unable to eliminate misalignment.

Solution #2

Typically this is caused by shapes with complex or ill-defined bounding boxes. Said shapes do not produce accurate results when 1) their size is reported via Automation and 2) they are written to a metafile, the difference between these causing the discrepancies in Hyperlink location.

The Fix : Place a border around your drawing. I typically solve this problem by creating a background page that has a standard, square title block on it with various fields for name, date, author etc. I then set this page to be the background of all my drawing pages. When exporting to HTML both Visio and the add-on have a very definite boundary from which to compute the image map so they should be accurate.

DD Findings: The shapes in our drawing were selected from Visio stencils so we presumed the bounding boxes would not be excessively complex and certainly not ill-defined.

However, we placed a border around the drawing. This resulted in some correction to the misalignment. The horizontal offset of the hotspot was eliminated but not the vertical offset.

We have again asked for more detailed examination of the problem by Visio and will report on further advice received. For the time being the only way to get accurate hotspots on exported drawings it to submit the images and image map to a third party image map editor and make the corrections manually.

This problem has us dogged. The nature of the responses and the degree of complaint indicates that these solutions have worked for some folks and others don't get the problem at all. Resolution problems like this have been known to relate to video card or some other hairy excuse. We'll get to the bottom of it somehow.

Tony Zilles

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