Saving Visio files as graphics

[aeenderson]

I have a couple of questions on how to best utilize Visio for graphics. I'm a technical writer and I create a lot of charts, etc., in Visio that I insert into Word as illustrations. 

   
• Is there a graphics format that is best to use for future conversion to XML? That is not a requirement for us... yet. But I anticipate it might be coming down the road, and I want to set the files up now to require the least amount of rework when that day does come.
• For some reason (I could just be making this up... it has been known to happen...  ), I thought that TIFF files were one of the preferred fomats for XML, so I've been trying to save my Visio files that way. However, I've run into a slight snag in that most of the files I save as TIFFs are ginourmous... I'm talking 26MB for a simple, one-page flow chart. Is there a setting I've messed up somewhere that I've messed up to get those totally unmanageble file sizes? The Visio (.vsd) files themselves are all well under 100KB, so I figure it has something to do with the conversion to TIFF.
• I'm not quite sure what all the options are for compressing the file size when converting to a graphics file... Group 3 or 4? Modified Huffman? I have been saving the resolution as 600 pixels because these technical documents are delivered in both hardcopy and as a softcopy PDF, so I want the print and screen versions to be as high quality as possible. Is there anything here that I could or should tweak?

The graphics are done using a pre-defined Visio color scheme. I'm using Visio 2010.

Thanks tons!
Amy

[Paul Herber]

No, don't TIFFs. SVGs are themselves XML not not very well supported. PNGs are a good format.