Hello,
We are having serious trouble regarding dashed lines in Microsoft
Visio - a problem that have been reported by others
(
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=...0ce0&[email protected]#link1)
and even mentioned somewhere in the Microsoft knowledge database. No
one has yet provided a reasonable workaround - I naively hope somebody
reads this post with the power to do something, e.g. alter a constant
in visio.h or cast the proper spell...
To sum up, the problem occurs when the length of a dashed line exceeds
a certain magic threshold. When this happens, the dashed line becomes
solid - not in the Microsoft Visio drawing itself, but when the
drawing is put into other Microsoft Office products. The problem
occurs when the drawing is embedded as every available scalable
format, including embedded Microsoft Visio objects, Enhanced Metafile,
various XML based formats etc.
In the above cited newsgroup thread, it was reported by Microsoft,
that this is actually a *feature*, implemented to save space(!): If
you have a sufficiently long, dashed line it supposedly takes up a lot
of space, so instead of wasting your precious hard disk space, your
figures get messed up, out of your control.
But I don't quite get the rationale behind this. Sometimes you
*really* need a dashed line and it is *not* acceptable with a solid
line, especially not if the line types get mixed up - I could mention
UML notation as example...
In our case this behaviour is indeed not acceptable. And as we have to
use Microsoft Visio drawings and as we have to embed them in Microsoft
Word and Powerpoint documents, the only thing left to do is to embed
the drawings as bitmaps. Now you can talk about taking up disk
space. As example, embedding an EMF vector edition of the drawing I
work on presently, increases the document size by 9 kb vs. 219 kb for
a 600x600 dpi GIF image. You need this resolution to just make the
figure remotely readable. While >20 times larger, it is far from the
quality of the vector based (but flawed) drawing.
Now you can tell me to break the long lines up in smaller pieces to
get rid of the "feature". No, this is not an option - this is
completely unmaintainable; we are talking several hundred figures with
several thousand dashed lines.
Then you can tell me to use a wider line type to decrease the number
of line elements, thus keeping the number below the magic
threshold. No, this not an option either as it seriously conflicts
with the mandatory layout rules of the figures.
I just can't belive that somebody could implement such a feature
without making it customizable. Or even documenting it
somewhere. Nowhere is it mentioned in any help files. We (of course)
believed it was a bug - and was shocked to discover it actually was a
feature that somebody had decided to implement.
Somebody, please do something...
Oh, btw: I use Microsoft Visio 2002 SR-1 on a Windows 2000 machine
(the situation was the same with an earlier version, I think).
Regards,
Ulrik Gammelby
