Sfsym
Export Apple SF Symbols as Vector SVG/PDF/PNG
Details
- External ID
- 47812964
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Sfsym
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 18, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 29
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7911311053984575
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I found myself reaching for SF Symbols' 'Copy Image As…' quite often during agentic design sessions, so I made a command-line tool that the agent can use by itself. It exports Apple SF Symbols as SVG, PDF, or PNG.The vector paths come directly from macOS's symbol renderer. Internally it reaches a private ivar on NSSymbolImageRep to get the CUINamedVectorGlyph, draws into a CGPDFContext, then walks the PDF content stream back out as SVG `d` commands. The output matches what the system draws, rather than an approximation traced from rasters.A few things about it:- Every subcommand accepts `--json`, and `sfsym schema` returns a machine-readable description of the whole CLI. - Symbol enumeration reads the OS's Assets.car BOM tree, so the list of 8,300+ names stays current with macOS updates without a version table in the binary. - Each SVG `<path>` carries a `data-layer` attribute, so you can retheme in CSS without touching geometry.It's been saving me a bunch of clicking. Please let me know if you have any other ideas for it.
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- apple sf symbols vector exporter
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a focused command-line utility wrapping macOS CoreGraphics/AppKit private or public symbol rendering APIs to export SVG, PDF, and PNG files.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Lucide icons, Tabler icons, Material icons
Concerns raised: Apple licensing restrictions for commercial use outside Apple platforms, Private ivar stability across macOS updates, SF Symbols animations don't translate to static export formats
Feature requests: Support for other icon sets (Lucide, Tabler, Material), Animation export support, SVG as default format instead of PDF
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 63 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 64 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 162 days after the earliest competitor.
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- pic2svg · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- SFSymbolReplacer · github · 2026-09-25 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- SvgUp · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Rust/WASM lighting data toolkit · hn · 2025-12-21 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data · hn · 2026-03-23 · 47 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Nexports · ph · 2026-09-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- WG HTML to Image · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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