SVG to PDF converter

How the SVG becomes a PDF

This is not print-to-PDF and not a screenshot in a page. The SVG element is walked node by node and re-expressed as PDF drawing operations — a <path> becomes the same Bézier curves in PDF syntax, fills stay fills, strokes keep their width and joins — so the output is true vector and prints sharp at any size. Two libraries do the work, jsPDF and svg2pdf.js, and they load on demand when you press the button, because together they weigh more than the rest of the site; until then the page costs you nothing. Both run in your browser. The file never leaves your machine.

The conversion needs a live DOM element to walk, so the tool mounts a hidden copy of your markup off-screen for the duration of the call and removes it afterwards. That copy is cleaned first — event-handler attributes and script URLs are stripped — so a file you were handed cannot run anything just because you converted it. Your original source is untouched; only the working copy is sanitised.

What a vector PDF gets you

A rasterised PDF is a picture in an envelope: zoom in and it pixelates, print large and it blurs, and the file grows with the square of its resolution. A vector PDF carries the geometry itself. Curves are resolution-independent, so the same file is correct on a laser printer, a plotter and a billboard RIP; file size tracks the complexity of the drawing, not its dimensions, so a logo destined for a banner can be a few kilobytes; and prepress software can still get at the objects — recolour a fill, check a stroke weight, impose the page. This is why print shops ask for PDF rather than PNG in the first place. If the drawing itself is heavier than it needs to be, run it through the optimiser first — fewer path commands in means fewer operators out.

Exact size, A4, and what a point is

Exact size makes the page fit the drawing precisely: one SVG user unit becomes one PDF point, so a 96 × 96 icon yields a 96 × 96 pt page — about 1.33 inches square, since a point is 1/72 inch. There is no margin and nothing to centre; the artwork is the page. This is the mode for handing a mark to a designer or dropping the file into another layout, where surrounding white space would only get in the way.

A4 portrait and A4 landscape put the drawing on a standard sheet (595.28 × 841.89 pt) instead, contain-fitted inside the margin you set — 0 to 200 points — and centred both ways. The aspect ratio is never distorted; the drawing is scaled until it meets the margin box on its longer side. This is the mode for something a person will print on office paper: a poster proof, a diagram for a meeting, a colouring page. The page-size readout updates as you switch, so you can confirm what you are about to generate before generating it. If the drawing's own proportions are wrong for the sheet, fix the geometry first in Resize & viewBox — the margin cannot re-crop for you.

Text: the one thing to sort out first

PDF text renders in whatever font the file embeds, and this conversion embeds none — text is mapped to the PDF standard fonts, Helvetica and its companions. A label in system UI type will look close enough; a headline in a display face will not. The robust fix is to stop shipping the font name and ship the letter shapes instead: convert the text to outlines with Text to Path before converting, and the PDF reproduces the design identically on every machine, because there is no font left to substitute. The trade-off is the usual one — outlined text is no longer selectable or editable as text — which for logos and headings is almost always the right trade.

When to use it

Handing artwork to people and processes that speak PDF: print shops, slide decks, office suites, laser cutters whose software imports PDF but not SVG, journals with figure requirements, anywhere "send it as a PDF" ends the conversation. It beats the browser's print dialog because the page is sized to the drawing — no headers, no margins you did not choose, no silent rasterisation. When the destination is a screen rather than paper, question the detour: browsers display SVG natively, and a PNG is the better answer for apps that want a simple image.

Common problems

• The text looks wrong. No fonts are embedded, so text falls back to the Helvetica family. Convert display text to outlines with Text to Path first and the geometry travels instead of the font name.
• Filters and masks disappeared. Blur and friends have no clean PDF equivalent and are dropped or approximated. Flatten effects into the artwork before exporting if they are load-bearing.
• Linked images came out blank. External URLs are not fetched during conversion. Inline the image as a data URI first; embedded images are carried into the PDF as raster objects.
• The print shop asked for CMYK. This PDF is RGB, like the SVG it came from. For colour-critical runs the conversion belongs in their prepress, with their profile — tell them the file is RGB and let them convert once, correctly.
• The page is a strange size. That is Exact size doing its job: the page equals the drawing's intrinsic units. Switch to an A4 mode for a standard sheet, or change the drawing's declared size in Resize & viewBox.