Since installing Mint 10 (julia) Gimp refuses to load *.wmf

Note The same wmf s are viewable in libreoffice write

Using terminal to launch gimp and trying to load a wmf results in:

The render WMF dialog shows -1 x -1 with width 1 and height 1.
Changing the width and height does not seem to help.
The X and Y ratios both show -262144.0000 and are not changeable.

Clicking OK results in a Gimp Message:

opening (path etc .wmf) failed:
could not open (path etc .wmf) for reading

The terminal has the following after this:

ERROR: font.c (1334): wmf_ipa_font_map: failed to load *any* font!

(file-wmf:18611): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion `width >= -1' failed
ERROR: font.c (1334): wmf_ipa_font_map: failed to load *any* font!

(file-wmf:18611): LibGimpWidgets-CRITICAL **: gimp_preview_area_draw: assertion `buf != NULL' failed
ERROR: font.c (1334): wmf_ipa_font_map: failed to load *any* font!

Normally I can find an answer to a problem by a bit of googling but not in this case.

Addendum
I have now found that libre office writer no longer previews wmfs but they can be seen after insertion. This rather annoying as I cant see what I want to insert.

This may not be the answer you are looking for, but WMF is a vector format and GIMP is a raster editor. GIMP is not the right program for this. Inkscape is, and should be able to open WMF files without issues.

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No this is not the answer I am looking for. Previously the gimp allowed selection of the size to open the file at. That is in its own none vector format. Something is corrupted or missing now. There is now no preview in libre office or the gimp nor in inkscape which I just installed. Inkscape opens wmfs without problem though just as libre office draw does.
Previously I had kde and all these wmfs ended up with thumbnails which they do not have now under gnome. Maybe its a gtk issue.
As a work around I have installed a wmf viewer under wine which allows quick previewing of wmfs.
Also If I want to edit one of these files in the gimp I can convert it with hijack pro under wine to another format but this does not let you choose the size for conversion - which the gimp did before - so you loose detail.

I've just come up against the same problem in Puppy Lucid (which uses Ubuntu lucid lynx installables). A google search found that the problem lies in defoma, which libwmf relies upon. It seems this is a very old problem indeed and I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed. There is a workaround though which can allow you to convert the wmf files to svg, which a vector format that can be loaded by Gimp.

The libwmf-bin install gives 5 small programs, one of which is wmf2svg.

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Thanks miriam-e but the work around does not seem to work for my setup.

But I have arch linux on my laptop now. The gimp loads .wmf under arch.

My current main problem is wanting to see the images before I insert them into
a document.
Libre office loads .wmf but will not preview them on arch or mint.
Open office will preview wmf but arch linux no longer supports it.
I have open office on my desktop so its not such a problem now.

wmf2svg does not seem to work on my desktop under mint. It does work under arch
linux on my laptop. Originally my wmf files were printhouse cmx files. I
converted these to wmf using an old copy of hijackpro under wine. This did
a superb conversion (but svg was not an option). I tried converting a wmf file
with imagemagick but the conversion was very poor - maybe I did not use the right options.
wmf2svg works well enough but the files increase in size by a factor of 10 and there
are discrepancies in the conversion. Because of the number of files involved and the varying
nesting of directories I would have to write a script to conveniently do the conversion.
As long as I can use open office to preview the scripts on my desktop I expect I will not
bother to convert all these wmfs. (Unless I come across a really good conversion program.)

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Thanks RockyRed. Very interesting that it works under Arch Linux.

Size doesn't matter with svg because it is a vector format (like wmf). You can open it in a text editor and alter the default view size. I can't remember which tag that is. Or load it into inkscape, resize and resave it.

I noticed that sometimes wmf2svg sometimes doesn't convert properly. It doesn't happen very often (at least in the files I have) but it is still annoying.

I converted directories full of hundreds of files in one go by simply running this little script from inside that directory:
Of course it expects that the files' extensions are in capitals, but you can repeat the same code replacing the appropriate line with for wmffile in *.wmf if you have files with lowercase extensions.

I should have mentioned that I was able to get ImageMagick to work by editing Searching for "wmf" in the file I found a command template for wmf2eps. I found wmf2svg to be a bit more reliable than wmf2eps so I changed the line toCheers,

Miriam

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Thanks again miriam-e

This script works on my desktop but I notice it results in *.WMF.svg so I modified it to remove the .WMF

#! /bin/sh

for wmffile in *.WMF
do
wmf2svg --wmf-fontdir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts $wmffile > `basename $wmffile WMF`svg

done

My wmfs are in about 200 directories some nested 2 deep so I will enclose this in another script I have which
will go into the directories. Needless to say this will all be done on a copy. Size is a slight consideration.
I notice that the resulting files are about 6x as big. My files occupy 125mg so after converting they will occupy
about 750mg which is ok.