ViewMeta—A Free Viewer for Windows Metafiles and Enhanced Metafiles
Ciarán Ó Duibhín
This program is designed for viewing Windows metafiles (.wmf) and enhanced metafiles (.emf). These formats may contain vector graphics, which are graphics of infinite resolution which can be magnified without limit and viewed. Many viewer programs for bitmap graphics claim to handle .wmf and .emf files too, but often all they do is convert the metafile to a bitmap, and work with that. But the resolution of the bitmap conversion will be constrained by the available memory, and it cannot therefore be magnified indefinitely, as a vector graphic should. Moreover, some viewers do not even try to use available memory, but are content to convert to a bitmap which will fit the screen without scrolling. It was the lack of free or reasonably priced viewers to read a large vector graphic (actually, a family tree), and to zoom and scroll around it, which led me to write ViewMeta.
Viewmeta CANNOT:
If time permits, the program may be enhanced in the future.
No support is provided with using the program, but if you have any comments or suggestions, I am interested to hear them.
Note added in 2012: for a number of years now, the free general graphics viewer IrfanView has been able to display .emf files at any desired size, by magnifying the vector graphics and then converting to bitmap (rather than, as previously, by converting to bitmap and then magnifying, which severely limited the obtainable resolution). There is now no advantage in using ViewMeta, and I recommend the use of IrfanView to display .emf files.