Unable to get a good quality picture in Word after exporting the yEd graph

Question

First, thanks for this great tool!

I need to insert the yEd graph (problem tree) I created in a Word document. I tried different export formats (EMF, JPG, BMP, PNG) then insert into Word but can't get anything one can read on the screen. Even with EMF, I need to zoom the Word document to 500% to be able to read the labels. With JPG, the quality is not that bad but some words in the labels get truncated ("..." instead of the full label). The only good quality export I can get is through PDF, but I do need to get the graph in a Word document...

Is the size of my yEd graph too big ? Is the font I used too small (I don't think so because it's Arial 10) ? What else did I do wrong ?

Note: using yEd 3.10 and Word 2010.

Sorry if the questions are stupid but thanks in advance for your answer!

Johan

Answer 1

There are two main types of export formats in yEd:

• bitmap (pixel images) like PNG, JPEG
• vector graph like PDF, EMF, SVG

In general, a vector graphics format would be the preferably since it can be scaled to any size. However, none of the format works well for exporting to MS Office products: either the yEd export has limitations (EMF) or the format is not (very well) supported by MS (PDF, SVG).

Therefore, the best way is to use a bitmap format (preferably PNG instead of Jpeg since it has less compression artifacts) and make sure that the image is large enough. With the default settings of the export dialog, one length unit in yEd results in one pixel in the image and a font size of 10pt should be clearly readably.

The export to bitmaps should be a pixel perfect match of the view in the yEd window and I'm surprised that there are truncated labels in the image which there not present in the view. To investigate this further, can you please upload one of your graphs with this problem? A same sample with at least one broken node is enough. File upload is described here: How to upload files to yEd Q&A?

Maybe this article is helpful, too: How can I use diagrams created with yEd in OpenOffice / LibreOffice?

 

Comments

I have been using an inelegant work around, but getting tolerable results by using the Insert Screenshot option in Word.  

Doesn't strictly answer your question, but does allow usable yEd diagrams in Word documents.