Icon Features

What every Visio-Cisco master carries, why, and how to use it.

Nine connection points

Every master has nine named connection points, positioned mathematically relative to the icon’s centre so any of the four cardinal directions, four diagonals, or “below the caption” anchors snap precisely:

Name	Formula	Use
North	(Width × 0.5, Height × 1.1)	Lines coming down to the icon from above
East	(Width × 1.1, Height × 0.5)	Right-side connectors
South	(Width × 0.5, Height × -0.1)	Lines coming up to the icon from below
West	(Width × -0.1, Height × 0.5)	Left-side connectors
NorthEast	(Width × 1.1, Height × 1.1)	45° anchors
NorthWest	(Width × -0.1, Height × 1.1)
SouthEast	(Width × 1.1, Height × -0.1)
SouthWest	(Width × -0.1, Height × -0.1)
SouthOfText	(Width × 0.5, -12 mm)	Anchor below the caption: chain of icons in a vertical list

The anchors sit 10% outside the icon’s bbox so a glued connector ends just outside the icon’s edge, which renders cleanly without overlap.

The per-master contract in Visio’s ShapeSheet: the nine named connection points and the shape-data rows, exactly as the pipeline wrote them.

Twenty-millimetre normalised size

Each icon is fit to 20 mm on its longer side, aspect preserved. This means:

• An 18 × 18 icon renders at 20 × 20 mm.
• An 18 × 14 icon renders at 20 × 15.5 mm.
• A 14 × 18 icon renders at 15.5 × 20 mm.

A drawing of fifty different network devices therefore looks like one drawing, not a collage of icons at random sizes.

Sizing is taken from the union of painted path bounding boxes, not the declared viewBox. This matters for the Cisco corpus because many icons carry generous viewBox padding that would make the artwork appear as a small dot if sizing were taken from the viewBox alone. Measuring the actual inked area ensures each icon fills its 20 mm frame.

This build is produced in two unit systems; see Metric vs US units. The 20 mm figure applies to the metric (_m) build; the US (_u) build uses the imperial equivalent.

Seven Shape Data fields

Every master ships with these seven fields ready for network metadata:

Field	Type	Notes
Hostname	String	Device hostname or FQDN
ManagementIP	String	Primary management IP address
Model	String	Hardware model (e.g. Catalyst 9300)
SerialNumber	String	Device serial number
Site	String	Physical or logical site name
Role	String	Network role (e.g. distribution, border, leaf)
VlanIds	String	Comma-separated VLAN IDs or ranges

Scripts can iterate the masters on a page and populate these from a Catalyst Center, NetBox, IPAM, or CMDB export, enabling round-trip network documentation workflows.

Shape Data populated on a dropped master.

Caption placement

Each master’s caption text sits below the icon, not over it. Sizes:

• TxtPinX = Width × 0.5 (centred)
• TxtPinY = below the icon body
• TxtWidth = capped so long names wrap to two lines instead of bleeding sideways
• TxtHeight = TEXTHEIGHT(TheText, TxtWidth) (grows for wrapped text)
• Char.Font = Calibri, Char.Size = 8 pt, Char.Color = RGB(0,0,0) black

Dark-mode -DM variants use white caption text (RGB(255,255,255)) so the label remains legible on a dark canvas.

Searchable from the panel

Keywords are written per the empirically-derived search contract: each master carries the display name as its sole keyword, and the Master/@Prompt attribute is populated on every master. Repeating a common leading token (such as the group name) across every master would demote the entire stencil from Visio search, so keyword stuffing is deliberately avoided.

For details on how search works and how to enable Visio’s own search, see Enabling Search.

Native stroke geometry

The Cisco corpus is predominantly line-drawn: 287 of 486 icons contain stroke-only elements. A fill-only SVG converter would silently drop those outlines, leaving partial or invisible icons.

The pipeline emits true Visio line geometry with correct weight, colour, and dash pattern. Dashed boundary shapes such as Fabric Zone reproduce their dashed stroke in native Visio geometry rather than being rasterised or converted to filled outlines.

Dark-mode (-DM) variants

A number of Cisco icons are drawn in near-black inks (#121212 / #222931). On a light canvas they’re fine; on a dark theme or a dark-filled shape they become very hard to read.

V-1 ships 31 dark-mode -DM variants: a white-fill twin for each affected icon:

Group	-DM count
Attribute	7
Endpoint (wireless)	9
Security	11
SD-Access	2
General	1
Total	30

Search -DM in the Shapes panel to list all variants. The twin has every fill recoloured white (including the caption text) so it reads cleanly on a dark canvas while the original stays ideal for light backgrounds.

The recolour is real fill geometry, not an outline or effect, so the -DM icons scale exactly like any other master: no haloing or blobbing at small sizes.

ResizeMode = 2

Master.ResizeMode = 2 means when you scale a master after dropping it, the line weight and font size scale with it. Useful when you have a high-level system overview at one scale and a detailed component sub-diagram at another: the icons retain their proportions either way.

Double-click opens the text editor

EventDblClick = OPENTEXTWIN(): double-clicking any icon jumps straight into editing its caption, which is by far the most frequent post-drop edit.

Behaviour

• Language = 1033 (en-US, the canonical Visio language ID)
• AlternativeText set to the display name: screen reader and accessibility tooling works correctly

Per-master contract

The exact configuration applied to every master is pinned as named constants in the build pipeline; nothing is inlined, and an automated verify step asserts the contract on every master in every build. Changes to the contract are deliberate and documented in Release Notes.