John Goldsmith's visLog

Visio base fonts

Some time ago, I wrote about how Visio resolves fonts identified in the document by an ID with the collection of fonts that are actually installed on a user's system. In this post I wanted to look at the standard set of fonts that Visio maintains and why they're there.

[The image above shows: English using Segoe UI (not a base font), Armenian using Sylfaen and Korean using Malgun Gothic]

Indexed colors across languages in Visio

If your users operate in different system languages then you need to consider what happens to your formulas when a document, authored in one language, is edited in a different one.

LOCTOLOC and LOCTOPAR - Understanding Visio Transform Functions

Visio has a number of ShapeSheet transform functions that allow you to transform a point expressed in one shape's coordinate space to the coordinate space of another one.

How to change multiple HSL values at once in Visio

When creating a set of colors that work well together you often want to change the saturation and luminosity levels on all of the colors at once. There are some amazing color tools out there, but up to now I've not found any that lets me do this en-masse adjustment.

So I thought I'd try and create a utility tool in Visio that lets you do this.

Setting a Radial Gradient Stop Position in Visio

This is a quick post on how radial gradient stops work in Visio.

Visio Layout and Routing Tools

I've been spending more time on Visio layout and routing in a customer project recently. Visio normally does a good job of laying out shapes and routing connectors between them, but occasionally you need to get a bit more insight into what's going on and in this post I'm going to demonstrate a few shape tools that can help.

Tracking shapes by string reference in Visio

Occasionally, in Visio, you want to create a ShapeSheet reference to a cell in a shape that may not exist. For example, you might want one shape to behave differently depending on whether another shape is already on the page, such as a title block or some other container style shape. In my case, I want to be able to set a target shape ID and have the another shape track its position.

Editing Visio Dynamic Connectors

This post is intended as a quick reference for manually editing Dynamic Connectors that I needed for a customer.

In general, Visio does a good job of handling routing using the Dynamic Connector, but occasionally, and depending on the routing style you have applied, some manual adjustment can be required.

Creating a Visio shape with an expanding row count

In this post I'm going to look at one option for creating a table style shape that increases its row count as it is resized vertically.

Enhancing Visio Event Monitor Output

The Visio Event Monitor that's part of the SDK is a great tool for understanding how Visio works and the events that are firing away while you work. So in this post I thought I'd demonstrate a quick technique for making the output a little easier to read.