Windows Metafile (WMF) converter
Convert old WMF clip-art and drawings, placeable or plain, to PNG, PDF or SVG trimmed to the picture.
.wmf
Format
About Windows Metafile (WMF)
WMF, the Windows Metafile, is the 16-bit ancestor of EMF from the Windows 3.x era. A placeable WMF starts with the Aldus header D7 CD C6 9A that records the picture's size; a plain WMF starts directly with the 01 00 09 00 metafile header and leaves the size to the drawing commands. Decades of clip-art collections, early Office documents and Visio exports are WMF.
We open both kinds. Our office engine plays the drawing commands, we trim the page to what was drawn, and the result goes out as a PDF figure, a PNG or an SVG. In our tests a Visio block diagram, a window-frame drawing with dimension numbers and a placeable heading converted with their lines and text in place.
The gaps are fonts and damage. Text is drawn in substitute fonts, and characters outside Latin and the scripts our fonts cover show as empty boxes. A metafile that ends before drawing anything is refused rather than returned as an empty picture.
Convert Windows Metafile (WMF) to…
Common Windows Metafile (WMF) problems
Old clip-art in WMF will not open in a modern app.
Use /convert/wmf-to-png for an image, or /convert/wmf-to-svg to keep it scalable for the web.
A WMF figure has to go into a LaTeX paper or a print job.
Use /convert/wmf-to-pdf; the page is cut to the drawing and the lines stay vectors.
Some characters in the converted picture are empty boxes.
They are in a script our fonts do not cover, often Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Retype them in an editor after converting to SVG.