I am attempting to import a .vsd file into Inkscape, but I have a text box that doesn't display properly - where the text was originally displayed in four separate lines (each separated by a carriage return) in MS Visio, it displays in one continuous line in Inkscape. I've tried manipulating the text to get it to wrap, but when I resize the text box, it just shrinks the text horizontally rather than wrapping it.

If you are a new Inkscape user, you may be seeing the outline of the object "bounding box", not a text-box per-se...

You might try copying the text and pasting it into a dragged text area or flowing it into a rectangle object.

http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... Enter-Flow
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... -Flow.html

Does it work if you double-click on the text, and insert a line break by hitting enter in the desired location?

You could also create a flow-text box, and copy-paste the text into it to have it auto-wrap. Click and drag with the text tool to create a flow text box.
Note that flowed text will only work inside Inkscape, SVG currently still needs manual linebreaks to display correctly, the file format doesn't support flowed text. You can, however, convert a flowed text into a normal text by using the corresponding item in the 'Text' menu.

I had manual line breaks that I inserted in Microsoft Visio, but they aren't reflected when I open the .vsd in Inkscape. Now, I am able to insert the line breaks manually once I have it opened in Inkscape, but is there a way to import them programmatically, rather than having to insert them manually and then drag the individual text boxes into place?

elarue wrote:I had manual line breaks that I inserted in Microsoft Visio, but they aren't reflected when I open the .vsd in Inkscape. Now, I am able to insert the line breaks manually once I have it opened in Inkscape, but is there a way to import them programmatically, rather than having to insert them manually and then drag the individual text boxes into place?

Any chance you can export (save as) an SVG file from Visio? Does that help/hinder?

tylerdurden wrote:

elarue wrote:I had manual line breaks that I inserted in Microsoft Visio, but they aren't reflected when I open the .vsd in Inkscape. Now, I am able to insert the line breaks manually once I have it opened in Inkscape, but is there a way to import them programmatically, rather than having to insert them manually and then drag the individual text boxes into place?

Any chance you can export (save as) an SVG file from Visio? Does that help/hinder?

Actually, we're trying to use Inkscape as part of an automated process to convert .vsd to .svg, since we can't use Visio as part of our automation system. But to your question, when I open the SVG file in Visio, the four lines of text are all on top of each other instead of being one right after the other as it's supposed to be - the SVG file opens correctly in any other program, though.

A quick search in the bug section at launchpad didn't reveal any hints about that bug on vsd import being known. If you've got some time to spare, could you do a search yourself here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape and, if you don't find anything, submit a report? (with files attached, and version numbers, operating system and all the info).

If the lines really show up above one another in Inkscape, it might be possible to fix the problem programmatically, though, until that is fixed.
Can you upload a screenshot of a text how it *should* look and a file that contains an imported text that looks wrong?

Correction: It might also *not* be possible to fix this with a workaround, depending upon the file structure you get after import.

Inkscape uses an external library for converting Visio files to SVG. Support for advanced or complex layouts of text content needs to be implemented in libvisio, not Inkscape. Such an implementation should not use Inkscape's current 'Flowed Text' format - it would need to be compatible and coordinated with whatever is planned for SVG 2 (CSS).

mmh. yes, it would possibly have to actually render the text, to see where it breaks, if the visio text is a visio implementation of flowed text, and it were to insert linebreaks...

See also the quoted IRC conversion in this comment in the bug tracker ...

Thx!