.emf image support in Oxygen xml Author

[Bruno.Ballarin]

Hello,

I have the constraint to design my figures with Visio (company requirement) and my xml output process requires images in .emf format.

As far as I see Oxygen xml Author does not render any of these 2 formats .vsd nor .emf.

So far my workaround consists in saving my figures in a third format: .svg.

I am looking for a solution to avoid to have to save my figures in 3 different formats. Would Oxygen xml Author be able to render .vsd or .emf figures? I tried to install Java Advanced Imaging(JAI).

Cheers,

Bruno

[Radu]

Hi Bruno,

What type of XML vocabulary are you using? Docbook, DITA, etc...
Do you publish it using tools provided by Oxygen or your own publishing engine?

Are you interested in rendering the images when the XML is edited in Oxygen in the Author editor mode or when the XML is published?
Oxygen is not a what you see is what you get editor, it is possible that even if an image is not rendered in the Author visual editing mode the publishing engine would render it in the generated output format.

Regards,
Radu

[Bruno.Ballarin]

Hi Radu,

I use Dita XML and our publishing engine is external (Dita exchange word Publisher with custom stylesheet).

I tried the publishing flow with an .emf file in the xml (instead of an .svg) and it is working, despite Oxygen xml Author does not render the figure in the author view.

So I could work with just the .vsd as external source for editing and the .emf for importing in the xml document if we accept to not have the figure rendered in Oxygen.Dita.

[Radu]

Hi Bruno,

Exactly, the fact that Oxygen cannot show that image when editing does not mean that the publishing could not properly render it.
We'll look into how much work adding support for viewing EMF and VSD in the Author editing mode would imply and maybe we'll add some improvements for this in a future version.

Regards,
Radu

[HomeGoods]

I too am looking for a way to display EMF images in DITA on oXygen Author (not Web Author).
Are there any plugins or something available to realize it?
URI to the image is just a relative path. So dita-glass is not an option.

[Radu]

Hi,

We do not have out of the box support for EMF in our Author visual editing mode.
We do have APIs which would allow other Java libraries to be used.
I created an open source plugin here:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/oxygenxml.emf.support

You need to download the entire project as a zip, unpack it and then copy the oxygenxml.emf.support folder to the "OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/plugins" folder.
Then look in the oxygenxml.emf.support/lib folder and follow the instructions in the readme file to copy the necessary libraries there.
After this re-start Oxygen and see if rendering EMF images in the Author mode works for you.

Regards,
Radu

[HomeGoods]

Thanks, Radu, for the nice plugin. Now some EMF images are rendered in Author mode.
Unfortunately most of my EMF images are either rendered in a corrupted form or not rendered at all ("Could not load image: Wrapped java.io.EOFException (file:/.../plugins/oxygenxml.emf.support/wsAccess.js#21)"). Probably it's just a limitation or a bug of FreeHEP library.

Written in JavaScript, the plugin is easy to explore. I'll try to extend it using a more robust converter. Thanks for showing us a good starting point.