Convert single PDF pages to multiple SVG files on
Debian Linux with pdf2svg
In my last article, I've explained
How to create PNG,
JPG, GIF pictures from one single PDF document
Convertion of PDF to images is useful, however as
PNG and JPEG
graphic formats are
raster graphics the image quality
gets crappy if the picture is zoomed to lets say 300%.
This means convertion to PNG / GIF etc. is not a good practice
especially if image quality is targetted.
I myself am not a quality freak but it was interesting to find out
it is possible to
convert the PDF pages to SVG (Scalable Vector
Graphics) graphics format.
Converting PDF to SVG is very easy as for GNU / Linux there is a
command line tool called
pdf2svg
pdf2svg's official page is here
The traditional source way compile and install is described on the
homepage. For Debian users
pdf2svg has already existing a
deb package.
To install
pdf2svg on Debian use:
debian:~# apt-get install --yes pdf2svg
...
Once installed usage of pdf2svg to convert PDF to multiple SVG
files is analogous to imagemagick's
convert .
To
convert the 44 pages Projects.pdf to multiple SVG
pages - (each PDF page to a separate SVG file) issue:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ for i in $(seq 1 44); do
\
pdf2svg Projects.pdf Projects-$i.SVG $i; \
done
This little loop tells each page number from the 44 PDF document to
be stored in separate SVG vector graphics file:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -1 *.svg|wc -l
44
Now the output SVG files are perfect for editting with
Inkscape or
Scribus and the picture quality is way
superior to old rasterized (JPEG, PNG) images