How to convert Visio stencils to something usefull.
Most of Visio Stencils (VSS files) are made of WMF or EMF files.
For such stencils it's possible to extract those WMF/EMFs, use and/or convert them
to any vector or bitmap format.
I recomend vsdump to extract metafiles.
It's quite easy: download and compile sources, put vsdump executable and chunk_parse_cmds.tbl
in the same directory. Run it as 'vsdump dump your_vss_file [directory_where_to_dump]'.
vsdump print a lot of debug output to console, so maybe you could benefit from redirecting it
to /dev/null or some logfile. By default vsdump extracts files to 'vsdmp' directory.
Since 0.0.43 version it can extract metafiles from Visio version 4, 5, 2000, 2002 and 2003 files.
In addition it will dump Icons for every stencil item as .ico files.
While WMF and EMF are much more widely supported, you could be interested to convert them
to something more standard, eg SVG.
At least for WMFs I can suggest
a suitable tool. pymfvu
is able to convert WMF and EMF to SVG. While support for WMF seems to be very good, the situation
is much worse for EMF and especially EMF+. At the moment it would be better to use Radek Doulik
enhanced version of OpenOffice.org importer. Check go-oo.org for details.
I've started to convert some Visio stencils to Dia shapes. The list of packages and shapes are below. | 
