How to import Cisco network symbols in LibreOffice Draw

2021-05-19

LibreOffice Draw has grown to be a decent competitor to Microsoft Visio. Today I wanted to lay out a network topology on paper, and since I wanted it to look enterprise, I decided to use the Cisco standard symbols. Here I’ll explain how to import those symbols.

  1. First, download the symbols as EPS here. Make sure you select the PMS 3015 if you want color.

  2. Extract the zip file someplace.

  3. Now, LibreOffice Draw can not render the vector data in the EPS file, so importing those directly will work, but it will not look pretty. So, we need to convert the EPS files to SVG. I use Inkscape for this action:

  4. Assuming Inkscape is already installed, enter a terminal and change directory to the extracted zip file content, then run:

$ for f in *.eps; do inkscape -l "$f" -o "${f%.eps}.svg"; done

For each file, this will run inkscape with the option -l which is equal to –export-plain-svg and output to a svg-file with the same name.

If everything completes, go ahead and remove the eps files.

  1. Open LibreOffice Draw and hit the Gallery icon on the right hand side, then click on New Theme….

  2. Enter a new for the new gallery (I chose “Cisco”), and on the next tab (Files), click on “Find Files…” and select the directory with the svg files, hit OK, then Add All. Now you can use the Cisco symbols fully vectorized.