How to get rid of the white background of MS Visio files by PDF-Conversion?

Question

I am currently drawing some charts and diagrams using MS Visio. But when I convert them into pdf for using in Latex-Documents, I get the whole page of the vsd-file, and not just the diagrams etc. So the entire page will be converted into pdf. Since I don't have access to tools such as Adobe Acrobat Pro etc., I also can't cut the diagram from the pdf-file just so. Adobe Reader hasn't got any alike function except the snapshot, which only helps if I copy it into MS Word or so. I am not an expert of MS Office, so I also can't convert to the pdf from MS Word, without having page background.

So the question is, is it possible to only convert the diagrams/charts or selections into pdf in -preferably- Visio or Word?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can resize the page to precisely fit the drawing. If you're using Visio 2010, you'll find it under the Design tab in the Size menu. That should get rid of the extra white surrounding the shapes in the diagram.

Answer 2

Old question, but if some still struggles, here is a different approach. Instead of manually resizing the visio page, I just crop the finished pdf. You can do so by using pdfcrop src dest. pdfcrop is a command line tool included in latex, so if you already use latex you should be able to use is straight away.

If you are on windows, below you can see a simple batch script which crops all pdf files in the current folder and all sub folders:

For /R %cd% %%G IN (*.pdf) do pdfcrop "%%G" "%%G"
pause