Sfsym
Export Apple SF Symbols as Vector SVG/PDF/PNG
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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.
HN · launched Apr 18, 2026 · 29 upvotes (top 21%) · 0 views
Niche: vector graphics software and resources · 91 launches, 9 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 91 launches in vector graphics software and resources →
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 : 173 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #32 of 174 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 162 days after the earliest competitor.
- SFS Editor · ph · 2026-10-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- pic2svg · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- SVGProof · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- JPG to SVG · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- 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 0.44
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