Interesting. I've looked at the shapes module in CPAN and there certainly doesn't seem to be any 'get' methods for this. I've also found literally no compendium of OLE documentation for this available. The xml schema is well-formed enough for the purposes of Visio but not for parsing. It appears that they engage some strange encoding and it's a mess trying to escape it all. If I am successful, I will append a module to CPAN once all is said and done.