Note: Since this utility was written, the maintainers of Poppler have released pdftocairo, which works on the same principle and is better maintained. I recommend using pdftocairo instead. pdf2svg is still available but is no longer actively developed.

A small program that converts a page of a PDF file into a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file for editing in Inkscape. It wraps Poppler and Cairo and was quite popular when it was written, as there were few other utilities available at the time.

Installing

  1. Download pdf2svg.
  2. Unpack the files and build the executable.
tar -zxf pdf2svg-0.2.3.tar.gz
cd pdf2svg-0.2.3
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

Usage

pdf2svg <input.pdf> <output.svg> [<pdf page no. or "all">]

Source code and binaries

Source code is on GitHub. pdf2svg is packaged for various Linux distributions (including Ubuntu and Fedora) and is available via the standard package managers.

Windows binaries are available from GitHub (32-bit and 64-bit).

Updates

  • 2015-06-16 (v0.2.3): Minor updates.
  • 2013-07-18 (v0.2.2): Updated renderer call — bitmaps now appear at full resolution.

Copyright © 2007–2015 David Barton
Copyright © 2007 Matthew Flaschen (all-pages support)
Copyright © 2008 Ed Grace (GNU Autotools)