How do I convert an SVG to a PDF on Linux

Question

How do I convert an SVG (containing a few words of latin text and some simple vector graphics) to a PDF on Linux?

I tried Inkscape 0.47 on Ubuntu Lucid, but it moves some sub-graphics randomly, and it makes some lines shorter in the output PDF. So its output is useless, because the graphics looks completely different.

I tried opening the SVG in Google Chrome 16 and printing it to PDF, but it distorts all the colors, and it also removes some elements. (The SVG appears fine on screen, but it's already bad in the print preview and the generated PDF is also bad)

I don't want to rasterize or render the SVG. A solution which converts the SVG to a bitmap image and then creates a PDF with the image embedded is not an answer to my question. (FYI Inscape 0.47 renders the text is a very ugly way, without antialiasing, when rendering to PNG)

Qre there any other options?

Solution 1

rsvg-convert did the trick for the SVG I wanted to convert:

$ sudo apt-get install librsvg2-bin
$ rsvg-convert -f pdf -o t.pdf t.svg

rsvg-convert -f pdf doesn't rasterize the SVG, and it embeds and subsets fonts (at least it has embedded the used characters of the Arial font). Sometimes font embedding fails (e.g. for the LMRoman17 font), and the whole font file gets copied to the generated PDF.

Dependencies on Ubuntu Lucid:

• libcairo.so.2
• libgobject-2.0.so.0
• libgthread-2.0.so.0
• libglib-2.0.so.0
• librsvg-2.so.2
• libpthread.so.0
• libc.so.6

By default, libcairo needs libX11, so rsvg-convert may be hard to install to a headless system.

Note: The man page of rsvg-convert states that the tool always rasterizes, but this isn't true. The manual is simply obsolete. Sometimes your svg generating tool can partially rasterize the svg image, which can also mislead you.

Solution 2

This works on Ubuntu Lucid:

$ sudo apt-get install inkscape
$ inkscape t.svg --export-pdf=t.pdf

The command-line Inkscape invocation above works even in headless mode, without a GUI (DISPLAY=). However, installing Inscape installs lots of dependencies, including X11.

Please note that the exit status of Inskscape is always 0, even if an error occurs -- so watch out for its stderr.

There is also inkscape --shell, suitable for converting many documents in a batch. This avoids the slow Inkscape startup time for each file:

$ (echo t.svg --export-pdf=t.pdf;
   echo u.svg --export-pdf=u.pdf) |
  DISPLAY= inkscape --shell

Inkscape is also useful for simplifying an SVG:

$ DISPLAY= inkscape t.svg --export-plain-svg=t.plain.svg

Solution 3

I have used CairoSVG successfully on OSX and Ubuntu.

pip install cairosvg
cairosvg in.svg -o out.pdf

CairoSVG Documentation

Solution 4

I'm wondering why it hasn't been mentioned before, but I tested a bunch of different svg->pdf converters and found that the best one is Headless Chrome. It produces the most precise results for me. Before switching to Chrome, I was trying to fight with Inkscape bugs, but many of them are too serious and I can't do much about it (transparency bugs, wrong fonts, etc).

chrome \
  --headless \
  --disable-gpu \
  --print-to-pdf-no-header \
  --print-to-pdf=output.pdf \
  input.svg

It needs some tweaks to use custom PDF size(A4 is default), but I was able to set custom size after some googling and playing with CSS and SVG attributes (check out this answer on stackoverflow)

Solution 5

I get good results from printing from Inkscape (0.47 too) to PDF, and for saving as PDF (but slightly different), but this might depend on the graphic at hand.

An alternative with lower resolution (I did not try any switches to improve it) is

 convert file.svgz file.pdf 

convert is part of the ImageMagick package. Rasterizer is another program:

 rasterizer -m application/pdf file.svgz -d file.pdf 

To find out, which programs which handle svgs are installed on your system, just try

 apropos -s 1 svg

The manpage for these programs should explain, wether the program is useful for converting the svg to pdf.

View more solutions

Comments

[Frank Breitling]

If you just have a few images to convert you might find it easier to use some of the online converters. I tried CloudConvert and it did a very good job with half the file size of the SVG.

[pts]

Thank you for your suggestions. FYI convert is not an answer to the original question, because convert rasterizes the SVG to a bitmap image, and the original question was looking for a solution which doesn't do that.

[Volker Stolz]

That's a lot of dependencies I'm seeing here: cairo, libgphoto, gtk3, libsane...Oh well, if it does the job...

[Konrad Rudolph]

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work on OS X. Still, nice answer.

[peterh]

NOT TRUE! First line of "man rsvg-convert": "turn SVG files into raster images.". Misleading, it DOES rasterization, -1!

[pts]

@PeterHorvath: Thanks for the feedback. I've changed the sentence to: rsvg-convert -f pdf doesn't rasterize the SVG. This is true now. Please reconsider your downvote. The first line of the man page (turn SVG files into raster images) is inaccurate, it doesn't apply to rsvg-convert -f pdf.

[Dylan Thurston]

The OP specified that Inkscape had rendering bugs; this matches my experience.

[Joachim Breitner]

I just tried it, and I thought it would rasterize the SVG: A very fine dotpattern got turned into something blurry. But it turns out a problem with my PDF viewer...

[Ayberk Özgür]

rsvg-convert mangled my document prepared with inkscape beyond recognition.

[Quandary]

rsvg-convert worked fine, can confirm it doesn't rasterize. But ALL text in the svg is GONE in the pdf...

[AJMansfield]

@AyberkÖzgür That's inkscape's fault - when you save an Inkscape project, it will by default save it as a SVG, but the SVG it saves includes a bunch of nonstandard inkscape-specific data that can frequently mess up other programs. You need to export as an SVG rather than just saving as a SVG.

[Alex Schröder]

On OSX using Homebrew, you can install Inkscape using brew install inkscape these days. The resulting /usr/local/bin/inkscape worked for me without having to run X11.app.

[Trendfischer]

Might save some time searching: On Suse-Systems the package containing rsvg-convert is called rsvg-view.

[Pratik Soni]

It worked for me and the quality of pdf is same as svg. Before this was using imagemagick to convert to pdf and the quality was poor especially for svg.

[Alper]

On my Mac the output of rsvg-convert is has a bunch of weird artifacts.

[0 _]

Inkscape can be installed on OS X from the dmg distributed at its own website, and then called from the command line after creating two symbolic links: ln -s ~/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin/inkscape ~/bin/inkscape and similarly for inkscape-bin (assuming ~/bin is in your $PATH).

[Artefact2]

You can use the -z (or --without-gui) flag with Inkscape to run it in batch mode only (no window will open at all).

[bodo]

There are even python-bindings you can use. Unfortunately I found that this method is rather limited, i.e. a lot of svg features are not supported.

[hola]

It resizes the PDF. I wanted it to be the same size of the SVG

[Benjamin R]

Worked perfectly for me in macOS. No rasterisation. brew install librsvg then used rsvg-convert -f pdf -o t.pdf t.svg as above.

[Jonny]

For macOS: brew cask install xquartz then brew cask install inkscape.

[Jonny]

I just found out that inkscape cannot open SVGs exported from Figma. 😵

[oarfish]

Unfortunately, this does not embed the fonts on macOS.

[oarfish]

This works with pdf output as well. In contrast to svg2pdf and rsvg-convert, this preserves the fonts.

[Adriel Jr]

Thanks, I put the wrong extension. I updated the example.

[mayrop]

Worked like a charm!

[fixer1234]

Welcome to Super User! External links can break or be unavailable, in which case your answer would be just a teaser. Even while links still work, the content can't be indexed to help people find the solution. Please include the essential information within your answer and use the link for attribution and further reading. Thanks.

[ticapix]

from WSL, you need some extra flags chromium --no-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=output.pdf input.svg

[Pavel]

Seems it rasterizes vector paths

[gouessej]

I used "urpmi librsvg" under Mageia Linux. @pts Please consider updating your answer as numerous distros use a different name for this library: pkgs.org/download/librsvg I'm going to upvote your answer ;) Thanks.

[David Roundy]

Note also that inkscape has changed its command line interface, so this won't work with a more recent inkscape.

[themadmax]

Rendering with custom fonts is better than other solution, great !

[Erich Kuester]

For Red Hat derivates (here Fedora 32) use chromium-browser on the command line ...

[Cameron Smith]

It does work it's just that the inkscape cli currently uses the option --export-filename inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html

[stackprotector]

Unfortunateley, this does not work for SVG 1.1.

[stackprotector]

Why don't you just share your solution for a custom size? How do I have to modify the command to pass the dimensions? Your linked answer does not tell that...

[Avael Kross]

@Thomas You can't just modify the command to pass the dimensions, you need to modify the svg file itself (according to my linked answer - you need to add styles for @page and add width&height in the <svg> tag).

[stackprotector]

@AvaelKross So you have to embed the SVG into a HTML file, correct? And then you pass the HTML file to chrome instead of the SVG?

[Tomasz Gandor]

And sometimes you can get the rasterized XML code of the SVG...

[Archisman Panigrahi]

The name of the package in Arch Linux is librsvg.

[Clumsy cat]

works on macos.

[Admin]

Did not work for a "plain" SVG output from Inkscape. The problem though appears to be Inkscape...