Convert PDF to SVG

To convert PDF to SVG, select or drop your PDF on this page and press Convert to SVG. Each page comes back as an SVG drawn the way the PDF draws it: lines, boxes, curves and every letter of the text become vector paths, so the page stays sharp however far you zoom in. A one-page PDF gives you one SVG, and a longer one gives you a ZIP with an SVG for each page.

We tried this PDF to SVG converter on a three-page test PDF: text with a box, a circle, a line and a curve on page one, a photo on page two and 30 lines of text on page three. In all three SVGs every letter was a path, stored once and reused wherever the same letter appears, and there was no editable text at all. The box, circle, line and curve were paths too. The photo came back as the very JPEG that was inside the PDF, byte for byte, in the same place on the page.

Each SVG keeps the size of its page in the PDF’s own unit, the point (1/72 of an inch): an A4 page comes out 595 by 842, and a US Letter page 612 by 792. Other documents reach SVG the same way, through a PDF: convert HTML to SVG for a saved web page, or convert text to SVG for a plain .txt file. Going the other way, convert SVG to PDF puts an SVG on a PDF page, though there it becomes a picture.

Only what the PDF draws as shapes comes back as shapes. A scanned PDF is a photo of paper, so its SVG holds that photo and nothing more: our scanned test page came back as one picture with no paths at all. A photo inside any PDF stays a photo as well, and blurs like one when you enlarge it a long way.

To get shapes from a scan, trace it. Convert the PDF to PNG first, then open the PNG in Image to SVG, which traces it in your browser in one of three styles (Logo or icon, Illustration, or Black and white) with 2 to 64 colours. Pictures over 2,000 pixels on the long side are scaled down before tracing, so an A4 page made at the default 150 DPI, about 1240 by 1755 pixels, is traced at full size.

The width and height inside the SVG are the page’s points, written with no unit. A browser reads a number with no unit as a pixel of 1/96 of an inch, so it shows an A4 page at about three quarters of its printed size. Where the real size matters, for printing or for cutting a shape out, check the size once the file is open in your program: an A4 page should measure 210 by 297 mm.

Pick SVG when the page has to stay sharp at any size, or when you want to move and recolour its parts in a vector editor. Pick PNG when a website, a chat or a form wants an ordinary picture. Keep the PDF when the program that needs the file accepts PDF: its words stay text you can search and copy, and in our test it was also the smallest, 41 KB for all three pages against 238 KB for the three SVGs. For a web page whose words you can still edit, convert PDF to HTML instead.