Documentation

Release Notes

Release Notes

V-1 (2026-06)

The first release of Visio-Cisco: a complete, searchable, drop-in Cisco stencil set for Microsoft Visio, generated programmatically on the proven Visio-Azure engine and shipped in both Metric and US measurement units.

What you get

  • 486 masters across 11 groups. Cisco product and network technology icons, covering routing, switching, SD-Access, SD-WAN, security, wireless, data centre, endpoints, management, general, and attribute categories.
  • Dual-unit builds. Every stencil ships in a Metric (_m) and a US (_u) variant, in Stencil-Metric/ and Stencil-US/. Identical artwork, connection points, shape data, and search in both: only the unit system differs. See Metric vs US units.
  • Per-icon SVG and PNG assets. All 486 source icons are published in the public repository as standalone files, free to use. The stencil engineering is GPL-3.0; the artwork remains copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. under Cisco’s published icon terms. Find them in the SVG/ and PNG/ folders, or download Visio-Cisco-Assets-V1.zip at the repo root for the full set in one archive. See Sponsorship for details.
  • Native stroke geometry. Cisco draws over half its icons with line work: 287 of 486 icons contain stroke-only elements. The converter emits true Visio line geometry with width, colour, and dash pattern preserved. A fill-only converter would have silently dropped these elements; this build does not.
  • 31 dark-mode (-DM) variants. White-fill twins of the flat-black icons, with white captions, for use on dark drawing canvases. The recolour is real fill geometry, so it scales cleanly at any size. See Icon Features.
  • Working shape search. Keywords written into every cell Visio indexes: Master/@NameU, Master/@Prompt, the ShapeKeywords PageSheet cell, document-level Keywords in docProps/app.xml, and dc:subject in docProps/core.xml. The keyword strategy is empirically derived: keywords are the display name only. Keyword-stuffing demotes stencils in Visio’s search ranking, so it is deliberately avoided. See the search contract notes.
  • Nine named connection points (N, E, S, W, NE, NW, SE, SW, SouthOfText) and seven network shape-data fields (Hostname, ManagementIP, Model, SerialNumber, Site, Role, VlanIds) on every master.
  • Drawing-resources companion. Dashed boxes, lines, callouts, bubbles, glow lines/boxes (9 colours), connector arrows, and colour palettes. See Drawing Resources.

Group breakdown

Group Masters
Attribute 27
Data Centre 21
Endpoint 62
General 7
Management 16
Routing 3
SD-Access 210
SD-WAN 13
Security 101
Switching 12
Wireless 14
Total 486

Artwork variants (v2, v3, etc.) are deliberate alternates from Cisco’s published library and are kept as distinct masters: they represent genuinely different visual treatments.

How it’s built

Generated end-to-end by a private, purpose-built pipeline (scan, normalise, scale, emit OOXML, verify) that is cross-platform (no Visio install required) and deterministic (identical input produces byte-identical .vssx). It carries over the hard-won search contract and OOXML construction approach proven on Visio-Azure, and its per-master contract and test suite run on every build. SHA-256 hashes of all artefacts are recorded in BUILD_REPORT.html in each release folder.

Known issues

None in V-1. All 486 source icons were converted without skips.

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