Convert SVG to PDF

Both formats can describe a drawing as instructions — a line from here to there, a curve of this radius, filled with this colour — and this conversion does not use that. resvg renders the SVG to a bitmap 1,024 pixels across, and that bitmap is what is placed on the PDF page. What arrives is a picture of the drawing rather than the drawing.

So the property people convert to PDF for is the one that is missing: there is a resolution now, and it was chosen for you rather than by you. At ordinary screen sizes it looks right. Across an A4 sheet 1,024 pixels works out at about 124 dpi against the 300 a printer expects, and on an A0 poster it is nearer 31. Where the drawing has to survive being enlarged, send the SVG itself or place it in a layout tool that writes vectors.

An SVG that contains text usually does not contain the font. It names one — "Helvetica Neue", "Inter" — and relies on the machine drawing it to have that font installed. On the designer’s computer it looks right. Elsewhere it falls back to something else, and a carefully spaced logo arrives in Arial.

The renderer used here has no fonts at all, so it does not fall back: a `<text>` element draws nothing, the rest of the artwork appears, and the words are gone. That makes the step printers call "outline your fonts" a prerequisite rather than a nicety. Convert type to paths in Illustrator, Inkscape or Figma before converting, and open the PDF once afterwards — a drawing whose logotype has quietly vanished still looks fine in a thumbnail.

Anything the SVG only points at rather than contains. An `<image>` element referencing a photograph by URL will be missing, because nothing here reaches out to the internet — the conversion runs entirely offline, which is the same property that keeps your file private. Embed the images in the SVG first if the drawing depends on them.

Animation and interactivity also go, and cannot do otherwise: SVG can contain moving parts and things that respond to a click, and a PDF page is still. If the animation is the point, the drawing wants to stay an SVG or become a video.

If the drawing is going onto a web page, keep it as an SVG. It is smaller than the equivalent PDF, every browser renders it natively, and it stays selectable and styleable with CSS. Converting to PDF for the web gives up all of that for nothing.

PDF earns its place the moment the file leaves your control: sent to a printer, attached to an email, submitted to a form, filed in an archive. Those are contexts where "it opens the same way everywhere" is worth more than editability, and where an SVG is likely to be met with a shrug.

The page takes its dimensions from the drawing by default — "Fit to image" — so the result fills it exactly with no border. On screen that looks like the drawing itself, which is usually what anyone wants from a logo or a diagram.

If the file is going to a printer who expects a standard sheet, set Page size to A4 or US Letter instead. Portrait or landscape comes with it, and the margin is a number of millimetres up to 50, applied on all four sides. On a standard sheet the drawing is centred and scaled down to fit inside those margins, never up, so a small logo stays crisp rather than being blown across the page.

An SVG describes colour in RGB, because it was made for screens. The PDF carries those same RGB values across faithfully, and nothing is separated into CMYK here.

For anything read on a screen that is correct. For commercial print it is one step short: the press needs CMYK, and that separation belongs with the printer or in a layout tool holding the right profile, where somebody can see what happens to the deep blues.

Drop several SVGs and each becomes its own PDF rather than pages of a single document, because deciding the page order is a decision a converter cannot make on your behalf.

If one multi-page PDF is the goal, convert them individually and merge afterwards. That way the order is one you chose rather than one that fell out of a file listing.

Much larger than the SVG, because the PDF holds pixels where the SVG held instructions. Measured at the 1,024-pixel width this conversion uses: a flat two-colour logo of 167 bytes came back as a 19 KB PDF, a sheet of forty coloured icons of 3 KB as 42 KB, and a full-bleed gradient of 300 bytes as 31 KB.

What decides it is how much of the page carries ink and how much that ink varies, not how complicated the original instructions were — which is why the order of the three results is not the order of the three sources. Flat artwork with large areas of one colour compresses best; gradients, blurs and soft shadows cost the most. All of it is still small next to anything holding a photograph.

The conversion runs entirely in your browser, which is also why external references cannot be fetched: there is no network step at any point.

That matters for what people actually convert here — unreleased logos, floor plans, patent drawings, product artwork before a launch. None of it is uploaded, and the network tab of your developer tools will confirm it rather than ask you to take it on trust.