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s417-lama/svg2pdf.bash

Created April 29, 2020 07:18
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Reliable way to convert an SVG file to a PDF file using headless Chrome
Raw
svg2pdf.bash
#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert an SVG file to a PDF file by using headless Chrome.
#
if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
echo "Usage: ./svg2pdf.bash input.svg output.pdf" 1>&2
exit 1
fi
INPUT=$1
OUTPUT=$2
HTML="
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {
margin: 0;
}
</style>
<script>
function init() {
const element = document.getElementById('targetsvg');
const positionInfo = element.getBoundingClientRect();
const height = positionInfo.height;
const width = positionInfo.width;
const style = document.createElement('style');
style.innerHTML = \`@page {margin: 0; size: \${width}px \${height}px}\`;
document.head.appendChild(style);
}
window.onload = init;
</script>
</head>
<body>
<img id=\"targetsvg\" src=\"${INPUT}\">
</body>
</html>
"
tmpfile=$(mktemp XXXXXX.html)
trap "rm -f $tmpfile" EXIT
echo $HTML > $tmpfile
google-chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=$OUTPUT $tmpfile
@rauschma
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rauschma commented Oct 5, 2025

Thanks! This is the only solution that worked for me with output from the npm package html-to-image. That package embeds HTML inside SVG – which looks good but stumps most converters.

I made the second argument optional like this:

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "Usage: svg2pdf input.svg [output.pdf]" 1>&2
  exit 1
fi

INPUT=$1
if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
  OUTPUT=$2
else
  OUTPUT=${INPUT%.*}.pdf
fi

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