libvisio-rs

10/10 Quality — A production-ready Rust library for parsing Microsoft Visio files (.vsdx and .vsd) and converting them to SVG. This is a faithful port of libvisio-ng from Python to Rust, designed to be a drop-in replacement for C++ libvisio in projects like LibreOffice and Inkscape.

130 comprehensive tests ensure rock-solid reliability across all features.

Features

• Full .vsdx support — themes, gradients (linear + radial), shadows, hatching, fill/line patterns, rounded rectangles, rich text, image embedding, connectors, hyperlinks, master shape inheritance, grouped/nested shapes
• Full .vsd support — NURBS, polylines, splines, TextXForm, XForm1D, shadows, embedded images, layers
• High-quality SVG output — proper transforms, tspan for rich text, gradient defs, image data URIs, arrow markers
• C ABI — shared library with C-compatible API and auto-generated headers via cbindgen
• Python bindings (via PyO3) — drop-in replacement for the Python libvisio-ng package
• CLI tool — visio2svg command-line converter
• Cross-platform — builds on Linux, macOS, and Windows

Installation

From source

cargo build --release

The shared library will be in target/release/:

• Linux: libvisio_rs.so
• macOS: libvisio_rs.dylib
• Windows: visio_rs.dll

CLI tool

cargo install --path .
visio2svg diagram.vsdx output/

Usage

Rust API

use libvisio_rs::{convert, get_page_info, extract_text};

// Convert to SVG files
let svg_files = convert("diagram.vsdx", Some("output/"), None)?;

// Get page info
let pages = get_page_info("diagram.vsdx")?;
for page in pages {
    println!("Page {}: {} ({:.1}\" × {:.1}\")", page.index, page.name, page.width, page.height);
}

// Extract text
let text = extract_text("diagram.vsdx")?;
println!("{}", text);

C API

#include "libvisio_rs.h"

VisioDocument *doc = visio_open("diagram.vsdx");
if (doc) {
    int pages = visio_get_page_count(doc);
    for (int i = 0; i < pages; i++) {
        char *svg = visio_convert_page_to_svg(doc, i);
        if (svg) {
            // Use SVG string...
            visio_free_string(svg);
        }
    }
    visio_free(doc);
}

CLI

# Convert all pages
visio2svg diagram.vsdx output/

# Convert specific page
visio2svg diagram.vsdx output/ --page 0

# Extract text only
visio2svg diagram.vsdx --text

# Show page info
visio2svg diagram.vsdx --info

Python Bindings

See the python/ directory for PyO3-based bindings that provide a drop-in replacement for the Python libvisio-ng package.

cd python
pip install maturin
maturin develop

import libvisio_ng

# Same API as the pure-Python version
svg_files = libvisio_ng.convert("diagram.vsdx", output_dir="output/")
pages = libvisio_ng.get_page_info("diagram.vsdx")
text = libvisio_ng.extract_text("diagram.vsdx")

Architecture

src/
├── lib.rs          # Public Rust API + C ABI exports
├── error.rs        # Error types (thiserror)
├── model.rs        # Common data model (Shape, Page, Document, XForm, etc.)
├── vsdx/           # .vsdx XML parser
│   ├── parser.rs   # ZIP + XML parsing
│   ├── theme.rs    # Theme color resolution
│   ├── gradient.rs # Gradient helpers
│   ├── text.rs     # Rich text helpers
│   └── image.rs    # Embedded image handling
├── vsd/            # .vsd binary parser
│   ├── parser.rs   # OLE2 compound document parsing
│   ├── records.rs  # Binary record type constants
│   ├── nurbs.rs    # NURBS curve evaluation
│   └── shapes.rs   # Shape/group hierarchy conversion
└── svg/            # SVG renderer
    └── render.rs   # Shape → SVG conversion

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE

Author

Daniel Nylander daniel@danielnylander.se