You can insert graphics into an OpenOffice Writer document – or any of a number of other document editing programs. It’s generally a simple “Insert picture/from file…” menu option.
Getting it not to look like garbage is the hard part. Most images are bitmaps and scaling bitmaps usually results in images that are either “chopped” or have lines that “stairstep”. And, of course, the text can be really ugly.
There is a class of image file that scales, and this is the structured image class of files. It includes SVG, Windows Metafile, and PostScript drawing commands as well as the (Windows-only) Visio embedded object.
Unfortunately, the geniuses determined the supported set of image files that the graphviz utility would generate and the geniuses who defined the images that OpenOffice Writer would import did not have lunch in the same building. About the only commonality is EPS, and in the Fedora standard RPM, EPS is not one of the options presently (mid-2008) included for graphviz.
Failing that, there’s a fairly easy workaround. Have graphviz output a PDF. PDF’s contain PostScript. There’s a utility named “pdftops” that can extract that PostScript and wrap it up in an EPS wrapper. Note that this isn’t the same program as “pdf2ps”!
Example:
dot -oBackingBeans.pdf -v -Tpdf BackingBeans.dot
pdf2ps -eps BackingBeans.pdf BackingBeans.eps
It’s probably pipeable, but this will do.
One other thing remains. The default font selection on my system wasn’t all that beautiful, so I overrode it:
graph[fontpath="/usr/share/fonts/liberation", fontsize=12, fontname="LiberationSans-Regular"];
Here, too, I’ve done the “brute force” thing and supplied the fontpath internally and manually. I should actually set up the environment, but I had other priorities that day and custom fonts are reputedly a pain in graphviz anyway. The “-v” option on graphviz lets you see what font is actually getting pulled, by the way.
