How To Use Inkscape Pdf
If we don’t select this, Inkscape will convert the text to vectors, which will make a simple task just a nightmare. 2 Once you import it, our PDF page will show as an Inkscape one, where each image will be embedded (if you select that option) and each text line will be an editable box. Open Inkscape and press Ctrl-O to open the PDF you want to work with. In the import window you should select 'import via Poppler'. Make also sure you select the page where the resource you wish to copy lives.
I'd like to extract some pdf images from a paper for presentation purposes. In windows, Adobe Illustrator works just fine, but I now have to perform this task in a Debian box.
Two popular solutions I found online are using
Inkscape can also save files in other formats. If you have cutting machine software that can't open or import SVG files, you may be able to save an Inkscape file in another format which you can then import for use with your machine. Some common file formats that can be imported and converted are DXF, EPS, and PDF files. Current PDF support PDF Import. SVN version of Inkscape (to-be 0.46) uses poppler (0.5.4 and above) to import PDF files. Implemented features: The new import extension can import paths, text, clippaths, masked or non-masked images, and softmasks. I needed a way to be able to modify PDF documents and I have Inkscape with all the features I need, except a functioning PDF import filter. Inkscape uses pstoedit which doesn’t extract embedded raster images and convert them for the SVG format. There is a plugin for pstoedit to convert to SVG for $50, but it caused a segfault on my machine.
The pdfimage does not meet my needs since I want vector graphics (pdf) rather than jpgs so I prefer to use Inkscape, but it does not work as expected. I hope I could use some selector tool to drag a box and select everything inside as I normally did with Illustrator, but none of the tools in Inkscape works.
If I use the 'select and transform objects' tool (the black arrow), the whole pdf page is selected while I only want a small portion; if I use the 'edit path by nodes' tool (the black triangle arrow with some nodes) I can only select a single object at a time. Drag and drop (even with the shift key pressed) does not work.
I'm wondering if there's a way to get around this, or is there a better tool in Debian to achieve the same? Thanks.
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2 Answers
In my humble opinion, I can suggest the way I use to get vector images from pdf
there is a tool called
pdftocairo, contained into poppler-utils
syntax:
pdftocairo is able to produce, in output, both raster and vector format, between these last, it is able to convert the content of single pdf page (if you have a multipage pdf doc, you first need to explode this in its single pdf pages, with pdftk for instance), into:
- -ps : generate PostScript file
- -eps : generate Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)
- -svg : generate a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file
the best output format for your needs may be the svg, so after converted the pdf page you can open this svg with any svg app (with inkscape or the good old sodipodi for instance), select the vector elements you want extract and save
RESUMING:
if you have a MULTIPAGE PDF
you FIRST split this multipage pdf into its single pages (create afolder for this single pages)
then use pdftocairo to convert any pdf page into svg
You can split multi-page pdf files using pdftk, then using inkscape to convert pdf to svg file using command line, e.g
YangNot the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged pdfgraphicsinkscape or ask your own question.
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.
sashoalm
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9 Answers
Inkscape is used by many people on Wikipedia to convert PDF to SVG.
They even have a handy guide on how to do so!
You can use Inkscape on the commandline only, without opening a GUI. Try this:
For a complete list of all commandline options, run inkscape --help.
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/imageanalysishttps://bitbucket.org/petermr/diagramanalyzerhttps://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.
peter.murray.rustpeter.murray.rustThis topic is quite old, but here is a handy solution that I found:
It offers a tool, pdf2png, which once installed does exactly the job in command line. I've tested it with irreproachable results so far, including with bitmaps.
EDIT : My mistake, this tool also converts letters to paths, so it does not address the initial question. However it does a good job anyway, and can be useful to anyone who does not intend to modify the code in the svg file, so I'll leave the post.
Here is the process that I ended up using. The main tool I used was Inkscape which was able to convert text alright.
- used Adobe Acrobat Pro actions with JavaScript to split-up the PDF sheets
- ran Inkscape Portable 0.48.5 from Windows Cmd to convert to SVG
- made some manual edits to a particular SVG XML attribute I was having issues with by using Windows Cmd and Windows PowerShell
Using Adobe Acrobat Pro Actions (formerly Batch Processing) create a custom action to separate PDF pages into separate files. Alternatively you may be able to split up PDFs with GhostScript
Acrobat JavaScript Action to split pages
Using Windows Cmd created batch file to loop through all PDF files in a folder and convert them to SVG
Batch file to convert PDF to SVG in current folder
I realize it is not best practice to manually brute force edit SVG or XML tags or attributes due to potential variations and should use an XML parser instead. However I had a simple issue where the stroke width on one drawing was very small, and on another the font family was being incorrectly identified, so I basically modified the previous Windows Cmd batch script to do a simple find and replace. The only changes were to the search string definitions and changing to call a PowerShell command. The PowerShell command will perform a find and replace and save the modified file with an added suffix. I did find some other references that could be better used to parse or modify the resultant SVG files if some other minor cleanup is needed to be performed.
Modifications to manually find and replace SVG XML data
powershell -Command '(Get-Content '%~n1.%_work_x1%') | ForEach-Object {$_ -replace 'stroke-width:0.06', 'stroke-width:1'} | ForEach-Object {$_ -replace 'font-family:Times Roman','font-family:Times New Roman'} | Set-Content '%~n1%_work_s2%.%_work_x2%'
Hope this might help someone
Adobe Acrobat Pro Actions and JavaScript references to Separate Pages
GhostScript references to Separate Pages
Inkscape Command Line references for PDF to SVG Conversion
Windows Cmd Batch File Script references
XML tag/attribute replacement research
Bash script to convert each page of a PDF into its own SVG file.
To generate in png, use --export-png, etc...
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):
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.
I found that xfig did an excellent job:
It did much better job than inkscape. Actually it was probably pdtoedit that did it.
Infinite RecursionHere is the NodeJS REST api for two PDF render scripts.https://github.com/pumppi/pdf2images
Scripts are: pdf2svg and Imagemagicks convert
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