Question 1

Will the SVG look exactly like the PDF?

Accepted Answer

Very close, but not pixel-identical — and we say so honestly. Text, rectangles, lines, curves, fills and embedded images are translated to real SVG elements at their original coordinates. However, fonts are substituted by family name (your system's Helvetica/Noto renders the glyphs), so widths and complex-script shaping like Devanagari conjuncts can differ slightly from the embedded PDF fonts.

Question 2

What is not converted?

Accepted Answer

The honest subset: gradient fills and patterns are omitted, clipping is approximated away, image masks are skipped, Type3 fonts are approximated, and text painted in stroke-only or clipped modes renders filled. Nothing fails silently — the tool's explainer lists these limits before you run, and everything else (text, paths, images) converts at full fidelity.

Question 3

Why is there no DPI setting?

Accepted Answer

Because SVG is vector — the viewBox is the page's size in points and every element is geometry, so the file renders crisply at any zoom or print size. DPI only matters for raster exports like JPG, PNG and TIFF; pick those tools when you need pixels.

Question 4

My PDF is a scan — what will the SVG contain?

Accepted Answer

Scanned pages are one big photo, so with “Embed images” on the photo is re-encoded as a base64 PNG inside the SVG (large but faithful); with it off you get the page's vector container, which is usually near-empty. For a pixel-perfect raster copy use PDF to PNG instead.

PDF to SVG

How it works

Frequently asked