Microsoft Visio 2000–2010 converter
Convert binary Visio .vsd drawings and Visio 2003 XML .vdx files to PDF or PNG without Visio, with notes on the versions that fail.
.vsd · .vdx
Format
About Microsoft Visio 2000–2010
VSD is the binary format Visio used up to Visio 2010, an OLE compound file with a VisioDocument stream that holds pages, masters and styles in a chunked record layout. VDX is the XML flavour Visio 2003 to 2010 could save instead. Both are still common in engineering, IT and facilities archives because nobody converted the old drawings when the office moved to Visio 2013 and .vsdx.
We read the version number from the file before converting. Visio 2000 and later drawings open, including .vsd files that newer Visio versions still save for compatibility. A Visio 5 floor plan came out with its dimension lines detached from the room and no text, so Visio 5 and earlier are refused with a request to re-save the drawing in a newer Visio.
Shapes, fills, transparency, placed bitmaps and page size come through well. Text fields that Visio formats with units are the visible flaw: a width of 25 ft shows as 300.0000, the stored value in inches, and angles show in radians. Objects pasted from Excel appear as their stored picture rather than live data.
Convert Microsoft Visio 2000–2010 to…
Common Microsoft Visio 2000–2010 problems
A shared drive is full of old .vsd drawings that need to stay readable.
Convert them with /convert/vsd-to-pdf; each file becomes its own PDF, and a refused Visio 5 file does not stop the rest.
Dimension labels in the PDF show long decimal numbers.
Those are Visio's stored values without the unit format. Open the drawing in Visio and save it as .vsdx, or correct the labels in the PDF review.
The converter says the drawing is from Visio 5 or earlier.
Open it in any later Visio, save it, and convert the new copy; the newer structure keeps the text the old one loses.