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When a picture of an SVG is enough, and when it is not

SVG is how logos, icons and charts are usually saved for the web: a description of shapes rather than a grid of pixels. Forms, print shops and email recipients often want a PDF instead. This tool puts the drawing on a page by having your browser draw it at high resolution, which is what most of those uses need.

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Which tool you need

  • A logo or chart for a document, a form or an email

    This is what the tool is for. Drawn at four thousand pixels on its longest side, the picture prints crisply at the size it fills on the page.

  • Artwork for a professional printer who asked for a vector PDF

    Export it from the program that made it, such as Illustrator, Inkscape or Figma. Those keep the shapes as vectors, which this tool does not.

  • Several drawings that belong in one document

    Convert each to its own PDF, then put them together in order with Merge PDF.

    Merge PDF

  • A PNG, JPG or WebP version of the same drawing

    Image to PDF takes those, several at a time.

    Image to PDF

Why the drawing becomes a picture

Turning SVG into PDF shapes faithfully means reimplementing most of a browser's drawing engine: gradients, masks, filters, embedded fonts and CSS. Getting part of that wrong produces a PDF that looks different from the drawing, which is worse than a sharp picture of it.

So the drawing is rendered by the browser you are using, which already draws SVG correctly, at a size large enough for print, and that picture is placed on the page. Anything the SVG would fetch from the web is taken out first, so opening it sends no request.

How the drawing sits on the page

The drawing is scaled to the full width between the margins, or to the height of the page if it is tall, whatever size it was saved at. An icon saved 24 pixels across fills the page as fully as a poster would, centered from side to side and starting at the top margin.

Transparent parts of the drawing stay transparent and show the white of the page. The page carries no page number, and the picture is stored as a lossless PNG, so the PDF is usually much larger than the SVG it came from.

Words and fonts inside the drawing

Because your browser draws the SVG, its words are drawn with the fonts on your device, and the Fonts setting this site's text converters offer plays no part here. A script your device can display, Chinese or Arabic included, comes out in the PDF as your browser shows it.

A font the drawing names that is not installed on your device is replaced by one of the browser's own, so the words keep their place but can change shape and width. Converting the text to outlines in the program that made the drawing, before saving it, keeps it looking the same on every device.

What to know before you start

  • Words inside the drawing become part of the picture and cannot be searched.
  • Zooming far past the page's own size shows pixels.
  • Pictures and fonts linked from the web are left out on purpose.
  • One drawing to a PDF, from an SVG file of up to 20 MB.

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