pdf2svg

Under Linux there aren't many freely available vector graphics editors and as far as I know there are none that can edit EPS (encapsulated postscript) and PDF (portable document format) files. I produce lots of these files in my day-to-day work and I would like to be able to edit them. The best vector graphics editor I have found so far isInkscape but it only reads SVG files… (Edit: recent versions can import PDFs but I'm not entirely happy with how text is imported; in particular, that fonts are not imported from the PDF.)

To overcome this problem I have written a very small utility to convert PDF files to SVG files using Poppler andCairo. Version 0.2.1 is available here (with modifications by Matthew Flaschen and Ed Grace). This appears to work on any PDF document that Poppler can read (try them in XPDF or Evince since they both use Poppler).

So now it is possible to easily edit PDF documents with your favourite SVG editor! One other alternative would be to use pstoedit but the commercial SVG module costs (unsurprisingly!) and the free SVG module is not very good at handling text… To install

• Download pdf2svg-0.2.1.tar.gz.
• Unpack the files and make the executable.

      tar -zxf pdf2svg-0.2.1.tar.gz        cd pdf2svg-0.2.1        ./configure --prefix=/usr/local        make        make install

To use

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

Note: if you specify all the pages you must give a filename with %d in it (which will automatically be replaced by the appropriate page number). E.g.

pdf2svg input.pdf output_page%d.svg all