Life & fun · December 22, 2025
Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG
I've noticed that many blog posts about papers (which are in PDF) use raster screenshots (JPG, PNG, etc.) of key diagrams, which makes it hard to zoom in on the details (e.g., on mobile) because they pixelate and turn blurry, unless the screenshot was taken at a much higher resolution than the space on the page, which enables some zooming in without much degradation. I wondered why they don't use SVG (since the original source in the PDF is usually a vector diagram), and when I went to try to extract diagrams as SVG from a PDF, I wasn't able to find an easy way to do that, even when trying…
In plain words
This tool extracts vector diagrams from PDFs and saves them as SVG files, preserving quality for viewing on any screen size without pixelation. Users open a PDF, visually select a diagram region by dragging a rectangle, and export it as scalable vector graphics. It's designed for bloggers and researchers who want to embed sharp, zoomable diagrams from academic papers and documents instead of using blurry raster screenshots. The tool uses Poppler for PDF processing and provides a simple graphical interface for selection and extraction.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I've noticed that many blog posts about papers (which are in PDF) use raster screenshots (JPG, PNG, etc.) of key diagrams, which makes it hard to zoom in on the details (e.g., on mobile) because they pixelate and turn blurry, unless the screenshot was taken at a much higher resolution than the space on the page, which enables some zooming in without much degradation. I wondered why they don't use SVG (since the original source in the PDF is usually a vector diagram), and when I went to try to extract diagrams as SVG from a PDF, I wasn't able to find an easy way to do that, even when trying SVG editors which have support for importing PDFs such as Inkscape. So I built a small GUI tool which lets you open a PDF and view it, visually select a rectangular region (which you can drag to reposition), and save the region to an SVG. It uses the Poppler CLI tools to do the PDF rendering and extraction, but it would be difficult to specify the necessary flags (especially the coordinates) to these tools manually without a GUI tool like this. Please try it out and see if it's helpful! Feature requests and bug reports are welcome, including any issues with installation or usage. Thanks for taking a look.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- ATAscii to SVG2016 · ivanceras.github.io · ▲416
- HVHTML visualization of a PDF file's internal structure2025 · github.com · ▲451
Hi, I've just finished a rebuild of this function and added a lot of new features: info, page index, minimap, inverted index,... I think it may be useful for inspection, debugging or just as a learning resource showcasing the PDF file format. This is a pet project and I would be happy to receive some feedback! Regards
- IMI made a 3D SVG Renderer that projects textures without rasterization2025 · seve.blog · ▲206
- AGA graph paper generator that renders vector PDFs in the browserJul 2026 · freegraphpaper.net · ▲107
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