EMF — Enhanced Windows Metafile

EMF is a vector format of Windows, the successor of the old WMF. It is the internal graphics language of the system itself: Windows uses it to send a drawing to print and to store vector insets in documents. That is why Word, PowerPoint and Visio accept EMF as a native format and scale it without pixelation.

A map is exported to EMF when the scheme is needed right inside an office document: a terrain plan in an explanatory note, an inset in a presentation, a base under a diagram in Visio, printing a large sheet through an ordinary Windows plotter driver. Putting a PNG picture there means getting a blur when it is enlarged, while EMF stays crisp at any scale.

The export works directly, without Inkscape: the map is rendered to SVG, the paths are broken into polylines and written as binary EMF commands. Honestly about the result: what you get is line outlines in a black pen — roads, buildings and water bodies as lines, without fills and without text labels. If you need a color map with street names, take SVG or PDF.