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…
Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG launched on December 22, 2025 with 11 votes, #788 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
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
Visually select and extract regions from PDFs into SVGs. No more pixelated screenshots! - mbrukman/pdf-extract-svg
This app enables extracting regions in a PDF file, such as a diagram, or chart, or an algorithm, using the vector data in the PDF into an SVG file, which scales losslessly. Typical alternative approaches of extracting diagrams and charts from PDF files (such as research papers) involve taking a screenshot and converting it to a raster image such as JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, or similar, which unfortunately become pixelated when zooming in or scaling them larger to examine fine-grained details. When you open the app, you will see a blank screen. Click on "Open PDF" button in the upper left and select a PDF. Once the PDF is opened, you can navigate pages using "<< Prev" and "Next >>" buttons, or…from github.com
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- ATAscii to SVG2016 · ivanceras.github.io · ▲416
- EREditable, royalty-free SVG illustrations2019 · gallery.manypixels.co · ▲295
A graph paper generator that renders vector PDFs in the browserJul 2026 · freegraphpaper.net · ▲107Download free printable graph paper as a PDF — 5 mm, 1/4 inch, 1 cm and more — or make your own custom graph paper in seconds. No login, prints true to scale.
Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific dataMar 2026 · github.com · ▲47Just wanted to share with HN a simple/minimal open source Python library that generates SVG files visualizing two dimensional data and distributions, in case others find it useful or interesting. I wrote it as a fun project, mostly because I found that the standard libraries in Python generated unnecessarily large SVG files. One nice property is that I can configure the visuals through CSS, which allows me to support dark/light mode browser settings. The graphs are specified as JSON files (the repository includes a few examples). It supports scatterplots, line plots, histograms,…
Svgurt – Transform images into SVGs2018 · svgurt.com · ▲24
More life & fun this month
the category →
A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.
Life & fun · 2d ago · permit.petercai.com
- IV
Life & fun · 15d ago · tanzaniaeducationproject.org
Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.
Life & fun · 15d ago · bigwords.page
Play a free virtual guitar online with your keyboard or by touch. Slow songs down and see every chord, string and strum. Acoustic, classic, electric and bass.
Life & fun · 9d ago · guitoro.com
Carrier settings from iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy firmware, decoded and compared: APNs, VoLTE, 5G and Wi-Fi Calling per carrier, and what each build changed.
Life & fun · 13d ago · carrierexplode.com
Life & fun · 23d ago · space.bl2.net
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, December 2025
the whole month →- GP
Life & fun · Dec 2025 · dosaygo-studio.github.io
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release. Please AMA!
Life & fun · Dec 2025 · jmail.world
PlanEat AI▲733AI turns your health goals into a 7-day menu & grocery list
AI · Dec 2025 · planeatai.com
Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…
Dev tools · Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com
