Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG
Details
- External ID
- 46354896
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Dec. 22, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5286259541984732
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- document processing and generation tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- convert pdf diagrams to svg format
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Extracting vector diagrams from arbitrary PDF pages into clean SVG requires parsing low-level PDF stream operators (drawing paths, bezier curves, clipping regions, and text glyphs) rather than just cropping pixels.
What it would actually take: Built using PDF parsing libraries (such as PDF.js or Poppler) to inspect the content stream of PDF pages. The core difficulty lies in identifying bounding boxes of vector illustrations amid surrounding text, extracting vector drawing instructions (path points, fill rules, clip paths, stroke matrices), and cleanly converting those internal operators into standard, scalable SVG path markup while omitting surrounding textual and layout artifacts.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 371 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #133 of 372 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 52 days after the earliest competitor.
- LineSVG · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- PDF reader with interactive visualizations for research papers · hn · 2026-02-27 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Visimer · hn · 2026-08-17 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SvgUp · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data · hn · 2026-03-23 · 47 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Vectopea · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- LaTeX To Image · ph · 2026-09-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- pic2svg · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.