PDF2SVG(1)

💖 PDF2SVG — the manual page, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this tiny little legend of a tool is about to become your new obsession. it's called pdf2svg, it lives in the General Commands Manual section (section 1, iykyk), and it does exactly one thing and does it flawlessly: it turns PDFs into SVGs. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

pdf2svg — PDF to SVG convertor 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pdf2svg pdffile svgfile [page number]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so pdf2svg is a tiny command-line utility that uses Cairo and Poppler under the hood to convert PDF documents into SVG files. literally tiny. it's giving "small but mighty." 👑

and here's the fun part: a multi-page PDF can be split up into one SVG per page by passing a file naming specification. so you're not stuck with one giant blob of a file — you can have a whole lil collection. slay. 🌈

⚠️ heads up bestie: the program does not follow the usual GNU command line syntax. do not come in here expecting --whatever, because that is not the energy we're on.

the first argument is the source PDF file. the second argument is the filename of the output SVG file — or a specification, if you're feeling fancy (details below, keep reading, don't skip 💖).

🌟 OPTIONS 🌟

the third parameter is optional, and it's your page selector. if you omit it, it just defaults to the first page of the PDF you passed in. no thoughts, just page one. 🙈

if you do pass it, it has to be a valid page label — typically something like "iii" or "3". that's it, that's the requirement.

🧚 all

this special selector makes the program iterate over every single page in the PDF. the whole thing. all of them. main character energy, no pages left behind. 🔥

but — and this is the important bit — because it cannot save multiple pages into one single SVG, the second parameter is expected to contain a sensible file specification:

pdf2svg document.pdf output-page%d.svg all

and yes, the usual format modificators work here too, because of course they do. so output-page%02d.svg will give you output-page00.svg, output-page01.svg, etc. obsessed. 😭💖

👑 AUTHOR 👑

pdf2svg was written by David Barton <davebarton@cityinthesky.co.uk> and Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen@gatech.edu>. absolute icons, we stan. 🫶

this manual page was written by Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others — sharing is caring, bestie). 🎀

and that's the whole page, fr fr. this lil doc came to you from July 16, 2008 — a vintage queen, timeless, still eating. go convert something gorgeous, bestie. mwah. 💅✨🌸🦋💖