Convert PDF to clean SVG? [closed]

Answer 1

Inkscape is used by many people on Wikipedia to convert PDF to SVG.

http://inkscape.org/

They even have a handy guide on how to do so!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Resources/PDF_conversion_to_SVG#Conversion_with_Inkscape

Answer 2

You can use Inkscape on the commandline only, without opening a GUI. Try this:

inkscape \
  --without-gui \
  --file=input.pdf \
  --export-plain-svg=output.svg 

For a complete list of all commandline options, run inkscape --help.

Answer 3

Bash script to convert each page of a PDF into its own SVG file.

#!/bin/bash
#
#  Make one PDF per page using PDF toolkit.
#  Convert this PDF to SVG using inkscape
#

inputPdf=$1

pageCnt=$(pdftk $inputPdf dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | cut -d " " -f 2)

for i in $(seq 1 $pageCnt); do
    echo "converting page $i..."
    pdftk ${inputPdf} cat $i output ${inputPdf%%.*}_${i}.pdf
    inkscape --without-gui "--file=${inputPdf%%.*}_${i}.pdf" "--export-plain-svg=${inputPdf%%.*}_${i}.svg"
done

To generate in png, use --export-png, etc...

Answer 4

I found that xfig did an excellent job:

pstoedit -f fig foo.pdf foo.fig
xfig foo.fig

export to svg

It did much better job than inkscape. Actually it was probably pdtoedit that did it.

Answer 5

Here is the NodeJS REST api for two PDF render scripts. https://github.com/pumppi/pdf2images

Scripts are: pdf2svg and Imagemagicks convert

Answer 6

If DVI to SVG is an option, you can also use dvisvgm to convert a DVI file to an SVG file. This works perfectly for instance for LaTeX formulas (with option --no-fonts):

dvisvgm --no-fonts input.dvi -o output.svg

There is also pdf2svg which uses poppler and Cairo to convert a pdf into SVG. When I tried this, the SVG was perfectly rendered in inkscape.