What is an EMF or WMF file, and how to open one
WMF and EMF are Windows Metafiles: drawings kept as a list of drawing commands rather than pixels, so they stay sharp at any size. Office has long used them for charts and clip art pasted between programs. Office suites show them, and Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw open and convert them.
27 October 2026 · 4 min read
A recording of drawing commands
A PNG or JPEG stores the colour of every pixel. A metafile instead stores the steps Windows took to draw the picture: a line from here to there, a filled shape, these words in this font. Played back, it draws the picture again at whatever size it is shown, which is why a chart kept as a metafile stays crisp when printed large.
- WMF, the Windows Metafile, dates from 16-bit Windows. Files made for other programs often carry an extra header, called placeable, that says how big the drawing is.
- EMF, the Enhanced Metafile, came with 32-bit Windows in the 1990s and measures in real units, so a drawing keeps its size between screens and printers.
- EMF+ adds the smoother drawing of Windows XP’s graphics library. Most EMF+ files also carry plain EMF commands, so older programs can still draw them.
Where you meet them
- Inside documents. An Excel chart pasted into Word or PowerPoint as a picture is often kept as an EMF, and a .docx or .pptx keeps it as a file such as media/image1.emf inside the package.
- Clip art and diagrams from older collections and from programs such as Visio.
- Exports from drawing, mapping and engineering programs that offer EMF as a Windows-friendly vector format.
Opening and converting them
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint insert and show them, and LibreOffice does the same.
- LibreOffice Draw opens one as a drawing whose parts you can select and change.
- Inkscape, free and open source, opens EMF and WMF and saves SVG, PDF or PNG. From a command line,
inkscape chart.emf --export-type=svgconverts one without opening a window. - Image viewers such as IrfanView show them as a picture.
Why one can look different elsewhere
A metafile names fonts rather than carrying them, so text can shift where a font is missing. Some programs draw only the plain EMF part of an EMF+ file and lose its smoothing, and a few writers record text by glyph number rather than by letter, which other readers cannot always turn back into words.
A note on safety
In 2005 a flaw in how Windows played WMF files let a picture run code, and Microsoft fixed it in January 2006 (MS06-001). It is long patched, but metafiles are instructions rather than pixels, which is why a reader should check every command and refuse a damaged file rather than follow it.
Our own product, disclosed
Where our own software comes into this
We make Rutba Office, a free desktop suite for Windows. Since version 2.21, its Pictures app opens EMF and WMF files and draws them as lines, shapes and words, and its Documents, Worksheets and Presentations apps draw charts and clip art kept as EMF or WMF where Office draws them. Text written by glyph number is left out for now, and a damaged file is refused with a sentence rather than drawn.
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