Convert PDF to clean SVG? [closed]

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I'm attempting to convert a PDF to SVG. However, the one I am using currently maps a path for every letter in every piece of text, meaning if I change the text in its source file, it looks ugly.

I was wondering what the cleanest PDF to SVG converter is, hopefully one that doesn't have a path for it's text areas that simply don't need one. As we know, PDF and SVG are fairly similar, so I assume there's some good converters out there.

Answer 1

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 2

I am currently using PDFBox which has good support for graphic output. There is good support for extracting the vector strokes and also for managing fonts. There are some good tools for trying it out (e.g. PDFReader will display as Java Graphics2D). You can intercept the graphics tool with an SVG tool like Batik (I do this and it gives good capture).

There is no simple way to convert all PDF to SVG - it depends on the strategy and tools used to create the PDFs. Some text is converted to vectors and cannot be easily reconstructed - you have to install vector fonts and look them up.

UPDATE: I have now developed this into a package PDF2SVG which does not use Batik any more:

which has been tested on a range of PDFs. It produces SVG output consisting of

• characters as one <svg:text> per character
• paths as <svg:path>
• images as <svg:image>

Later packages will (hopefully) convert the characters to running text and the paths to higher-level graphics objects

UPDATE: We can now re-create running text from the SVG characters. We've also converted diagrams to domain-specific XML (e.g. chemical spectra). See https://bitbucket.org/petermr/svg2xml-dev. It's still in Alpha, but is moving at a useful speed. Anyone can join in!

UPDATE. (@Tim Kelty) We are continuing to work on PDF2SVG and also downstream tools that do (limited) Java OCR and creation of higher-level graphics primitives (arrows, boxes, etc.) See https://bitbucket.org/petermr/imageanalysis https://bitbucket.org/petermr/diagramanalyzer https://bitbucket.org/petermr/norma and https://bitbucket.org/petermr/ami-core . This is a funded project to capture 100 million facts from the scientific literature (contentmine.org) much of which is PDF.

Answer 3

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.