Unwanted whitespace padding around FSP drawing saved as graphic

[Bald Eagle]

I have been working with Chris' great Word Cloud smartshape {thanks!}
http://www.visguy.com/2015/11/25/area-filling-text-shape/
in order to make some items for the Free State Project's upcoming Liberty Forum, in celebration of achieving the goal of getting 20,000 signers after 15 long years.   
(We can engrave GRANITE!  )

The word cloud is getting output to a PNG format graphic, which gets imported into LaserCAD for engraving.

When I save the file in this way, I get a lot of whitespace added to my drawing, which really throws everything off and seriously disturbs the workflow.  LaserCAD automatically defines the origin as the bottom left corner of the drawing, and now this is not at the lower left corner of the workpiece.  Trimming off the extra stuff to get back to a square drawing, or any other 'solution' I suggested, is not trivial due to, let's call them "human factors".

Could someone identify and perhaps explain the origin of this effect, how to avoid it, or maybe suggest a practical workaround?
Thanks!

I added a line around the square to show how the extra whitespace gets added asymmetrically - we can't have an outline in the graphic.
This in direct contrast to when I tried to save some geometric drawings with a line thickness of 13, and it chopped off the end caps and half of the line width - so I then had to ADD whitespace by saving the drawing centered in a larger white square.   

[Yacine]

Hi BaldEagle,
I suspect the white space being the margin in the actual shapes.
Can you upload a smaller version of your file as vsd?

[Bald Eagle]

Hi Yacine,
I too suspected that that might be the case, although I checked, and to me, it doesn't appear that way.

Have a look and see if I'm missing something.
Thank you 

[I had to delete a lot of names to get the file size under the 500 kb limit, but I left the large text on the edges]

[Hey Ken]

Bald Eagle:

   Here’s a simple solution: change the thing from Solid Fill to No Fill.  That turns it clear, and you can then put whatever kind of shape behind it to simulate whatever size/color/etc. of fill that you want.  I tried it with your attachment and it worked no problem.

   As an aside, it’s possible we may know each other.  I was a speaker at the Free State Project’s Liberty Forums in 2012 (talking about my novel) and in 2013 (talking up Toastmasters), and I attended my first PorcFest last June staying as a guest in the Babb compound at Rogers campground.  Small world.

   - Ken
 

[Yacine]

change the thing from Solid Fill to No Fill.  That turns it clear, and you can then put whatever kind of shape behind it to simulate whatever size/color/etc. of fill that you want.  I tried it with your attachment and it worked no problem.

I did both remove the filling from all shapes and from the "name" shapes only. Can't confirm, that it worked. Am I missing something?

Could it be a version issue? I tried it in both V2007 and 2013.

[Bald Eagle]

Well, well.   
Indeed we have met - I used to live in Maryland, and IIRC I met you at the MD State Convention.
I moved up here in 2007 after a brief stay in VA.
At long last, Chip Spangler finally moved up here.
Also, I'm waiting to see if we actually have any snow at this latitude on February 28 this year.   
When do you think you'll be in NH next?

[Bald Eagle]

I did both remove the filling from all shapes and from the "name" shapes only. Can't confirm, that it worked. Am I missing something?
Could it be a version issue? I tried it in both V2007 and 2013.

I guess I'm not quite following either, Ken.
I have a rectangle with a subtracted square that I used to keep the names constrained to some specified dimensions, and out of the center square, where a graphic goes.  I had that filled with white because the laser cutter need the black and white to differentiate for engraving mode.
Did you delete that and just put a plain rectangle?

[Bald Eagle]

 Since this project involved a "cutout", I'll just mention that this looked pretty interesting:
http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=5450.msg21602#msg21602
More nice work by Yacine.
I'll have to play around with that on a future project. 

[Hey Ken]

   Oops.  My bad.  I misread Bald Eagle’s intent.  Guess I was overly excited to run into someone here I actually know!  What are the odds??

   Mr. Eagle: Nope, no plans to visit NH in 2016—unless I get invited to speak at PorcFest (hint, hint), but let’s take that conversation off-forum.  You can contact me via the link in my signature line below or just Google me.  I ain't hard to find.

   - Ken

[Yacine]

Hi BaldEagle,
since there seams to be no solution to the blank space problem, here's a possible workaround:
The better image processing softwares on the market (photoshop or gimp) have scripting capabilities.
If you set a border to the background image, you can crop the image to the exact borders of the background, then add some additional cropping to eliminate the border itself.
Would have been nice to avoid this extra step, but at least this can be an almost automatic workflow.
To increase the automatism, you could even write a macro in Visio to run both the export to png and the manipulation in the image processing tool.

Rgds,
Y.

[Bald Eagle]

I see.
I do so often wish that more of these software features were open source, analyzable, fixable, and sorta eventually worked once and for all - but as so often happens, MS has to "improve" your "experience".
So I have the ability to export and automate a script in another piece of software, but they can't just get the export feature right to begin with....   

What are my options with copy/paste?   When I save to a graphic file, I can specify 300-600 ppi which is what we shoot for for various technical reasons.   I'm assuming that I'll have to scale everything for the default 96 dpi screen resolution, copy/paste a dimensionally large drawing, then just adjust the dimensions down so that it works out to 300-600 dpi....

Maybe I'll take a look at saving it to an earlier Visio format and see if my copy of home/technical handles it any differently...

Thanks for taking a look into this, Ken and Yacine.

[Bald Eagle]

I think I may have found the origin of the problem.

There was some kind of invisible box on the page - looks like something Chris had in the original file.
Hovering over it pops up "Multiple Hyperlinks..."
I was able to right-click on it and select "Lock and Hide"

[CTRL]-[A] to the rescue!

[Bald Eagle]

Actually, the proper fix for this was selecting, removing the check box on the delete protection setting, and then deleting   

There's some interesting stuff going on with the inability to copy and past anything.  NOTHING can be copied without triggering the error.
An ok workaround is to [CTRL] [Left-Click] [Drag] [Release] which duplicates anything, even the word cloud smart shape.

Just curious - I'm assuming that with all the other amazing things that people can productively use Visio for - that an alphabetized list could be extracted from the drawing sheet...?   Is that hard to learn how to do?

Currently working on several other completely insane projects.   

[Yacine]

What do you mean by

... that an alphabetized list could be extracted from the drawing sheet...?

?

[Bald Eagle]

Recall that the drawing is a large number of Word-Cloud smart-shapes arranged to fit together into a 16x12 inch rectangle.
Who's in the list?
Scanning all of the shapes to get their text and then sorting them.
The result could either be exported to a text file, Excel as space-delimited text, a new rectangle smart shape, ...

I can write thousands of lines of computer graphics code, but I haven't touched VB or any of the real work horses built into Visio, so I suppose the sooner I start to learn THAT, the sooner I'll be more useful around here....