How can I use TikZ to make standalone (SVG) graphics?

Question

I would like to use TikZ in other settings than TeX and I'd especially like to use the drawings on websites where the text should be searchable and selectable. However, I'm unsure of the best way to convert my drawings to SVG.

How do I best take some TikZ code, render the drawing and turn the output into SVG?

Answer 1

You can use the standalone class to produce tight PDF files for one or multiple TikZ pictures. I originally wrote it to simplify the creation of the many pictures of my thesis. Since v1.0 it includes a convert option which can convert the produced PDF into a graphics file automatically (using external software, which requires the -shell-escape compiler option).

This is very similar to Compile a LaTeX document into a PNG image that's as short as possible, but SVG needs some extra care.

You can write your TikZ pictures the following way:

\documentclass[tikz,convert={outfile=\jobname.svg}]{standalone}
%\usetikzlibrary{...}% tikz package already loaded by 'tikz' option
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}% Example:
  \draw (0,0) -- (10,10); % ...
  \draw (10,0) -- (0,10); % ...
  \node at (5,5) {Lorem ipsum at domine standalonus};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Then either you compile the file as usual with pdflatex or another latex and convert the PDF to a SVG manually or compile it with the -shell-escape option and let standalone convert it for you.

Manual conversion can be done with a number of tools. It is simpler under Linux, because these tools are easily available there, but should be possible under Windows as well. (The convert options isn't really tested under Windows, btw.) By default standalone uses Image Magick's convert, which can do PDF to SVG but will not always give you good results. The pdf2svg tool seems to be better suited, but isn't supported out-of-the-box by standalone yet. It can of course be used manually as shown in Exporting all equations from a document as individual svg files.

---

You can configure standalone to use pdf2svg directly by using the command key of the convert option. Unfortunately, there is a small bug in standalone preventing it. I just fixed that and will upload the new version today.

With this you can write:

\documentclass[crop,tikz,convert={outext=.svg,command=\unexpanded{pdf2svg \infile\space\outfile}},multi=false]{standalone}[2012/04/13]
%\usetikzlibrary{...}% tikz package already loaded by 'tikz' option
\makeatletter
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
  \draw (0,0) -- (10,10); % ...
  \draw (10,0) -- (0,10); % ...
  \draw (5,0) -- (0,10); % ...
  \node at (5,5) {Lorem ipsum at domine standalonus};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The \unexpanded is required because LaTeX expands class options. You can also add \noexpand before every macro instead.

If you need this more often you can also use a standalone.cfg file which enables this for all (local) standalone files. Simply create this file as follows in the same directory:

% Local standalone.cfg file
\input{standalone/standalone.cfg}% Load main standalone.cfg file
\standaloneconfig{convert={command={pdf2svg \infile\space\outfile}}}

---

I might add a special pdf2svg key in the next version as well, so you only need to write the following then:

\documentclass[crop,tikz,convert=pdf2svg]{standalone}[2012/04/13]
% ...

Answer 2

You can use dvisvgm, which is a built-in tool of some TeX distributions (e.g. MiKTeX).

The basic usage:

latex testsvg.tex
dvisvgm testsvg.dvi

Then the SVG file will be saved in the current directory.

If you converted a simple math formula but get garbage when displaying the SVG, you can run dvisvgm with option --no-fonts to replace the fonts with path elements.

dvisvgm --no-fonts testsvg.dvi

As of version 2.0, you can call dvisvgm with option --font-format=woff, you should get SVG files that render correctly in almost all recent web browsers.

dvisvgm --font-format=woff testsvg.dvi

If you use TeXstudio, you can edit the texstudio.ini file (located in AppData\Roaming\TeXstudio for Windows) and add the following line below [texmaker].

Tools\Commands\dvi2svg="txs:///latex | dvisvgm --font-format=woff %.dvi"

Restart TeXstudio and you can find your custom command at Tools->User->dvi2svg.

Answer 3

I use tex4ht and set the PGF output format to SVG. This solution comes from page 110 of the pgfmanual http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf.

I've only used it to create SVG of a TikZ picture in an otherwise empty \documentclass{article} but it looks like you could use this to make html with SVG graphics of a large document.

The advantage of this approach is that the SVG is produced by PGF and you know you're getting vector graphics. Also you get the result in a single step. It won't do functional shading or matricies and text in the pictures can be a problem but there's more on fixing that in the pgfmanual.

• In the TeX or LaTeX document preamble before you load the TikZ package, e.g. with \usepackage{tikz} in LaTeX type:

  \def\pgfsysdriver{pgfsys-tex4ht.def}
  

• Then process the TeX or LaTeX with httex or htlatex as appropriate. You may need to add tex4ht to your tex installation; it's at http://www.tug.org/applications/tex4ht/. For example to process my file called logoname.tex I do

  htlatex logoname.tex
  

• The following output files are created in the current directory

  logoname.html 
  logoname.css
  logoname-1.svg
  

If you have more TikZ pictures in the document I assume they would become logoname-2.svg and so on.

I'm able to look at the SVG output in firefox and inkscape so it seems to produce good results.

Answer 4

On linux, you can use pdf2svg (an opensource tool). All glyphs are converted to paths, thus you can't edit your text. But it is the only tool that seems to give good results for images mixing drawings and texts.

In your MWE, to get smooth result, I add the smooth option to plot.

Here is a snapshot of the svg file rendered by Firefox (click on the image to download the SVG file):

Here the two commands used to convert TEX to SVG:

pdflatex file.tex
pdf2svg file.pdf file.svg

Your MWE with my changes:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[domain=-2:2,samples=100,scale=1.0,>=latex]
\tikzset{bgrid/.style={help lines,color=blue!10,very thin}}

\draw[bgrid] (-1.5,-3.5) grid (7.5,3.5);

\draw[<->, color=black] (-1.5,0) -- (7.5,0) node[right] {$x$};
\draw[<->, color=black] (0,-3.5) -- (0,3.5) node[above] {$y$};

\foreach \x/\xtext in {-1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7}
\draw (\x cm,1pt) -- (\x cm,-1pt) node[anchor=north] {$\xtext$};

\foreach \y/\ytext in {-3,-2,-1,1,2,3}
\draw (1pt,\y cm) -- (-1pt,\y cm) node[anchor=east] {$\ytext$};

\draw[thick,color=black,domain=0:7.5,smooth]
plot (\x,{sqrt(\x)}) node[anchor=south] {$y = \sqrt{x}$};
\draw[dashed,color=black,domain=0:7.5,smooth]
plot (\x,{(-1)*(sqrt(\x))}) node[anchor=north] {$y = -\sqrt{x}$};
\draw[thick,color=black,domain=-1.5:5.5,samples=3]
plot (\x,{(\x)-2}) node[anchor=south] {$y = x - 2$};

\filldraw[black] (4,2) circle(2pt) node[anchor=south east] {$(4, 2)$};
\filldraw[red] (1,-1) circle(2pt);
\draw[red] (1.5,-1) node[anchor=west] {$(1, -1)$};

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Answer 5

If I run dvisvgm with option -n and the evaluation of PostScript specials is enabled, I get the expected result:

Since MiKTeX doesn't provide a dvisvgm binary through its repositories, you have to install it manually. Recent builds for MiKTeX are available from the dvisvgm website. Simply extract dvisvgm.exe to the MiKTeX subfolder miktex\bin, or even better, install it in a local texmf tree.

Answer 6

You might want to check out a tool I just wrote: tikz2svg.

Given in.tikz (or stdin):

> cat in.tikz
\begin{tikzpicture}
  \fill[red!90!black]   ( 90:.6) circle (1);
  \fill[green!80!black] (210:.6) circle (1);
  \fill[blue!90!black] (330:.6) circle (1);
\end{tikzpicture}

It outputs:

> cat tikz2svg < in.tikz
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="93.472pt" height="86.205pt" viewBox="0 0 93.472 86.205" version="1.1">
<g id="surface1">
<path style=" stroke:none;fill-rule:nonzero;fill:rgb(89.99939%,0%,0%);fill-opacity:1;" d="M 76.742188 30.347656 C 76.742188 14.691406 64.050781 2 48.394531 2 C 32.742188 2 20.050781 14.691406 20.050781 30.347656 C 20.050781 46.003906 32.742188 58.695312 48.394531 58.695312 C 64.050781 58.695312 76.742188 46.003906 76.742188 30.347656 Z "/>
<path style=" stroke:none;fill-rule:nonzero;fill:rgb(0%,79.998779%,0%);fill-opacity:1;" d="M 62.011719 55.859375 C 62.011719 40.203125 49.324219 27.511719 33.667969 27.511719 C 18.011719 27.511719 5.320312 40.203125 5.320312 55.859375 C 5.320312 71.515625 18.011719 84.207031 33.667969 84.207031 C 49.324219 84.207031 62.011719 71.515625 62.011719 55.859375 Z "/>
<path style=" stroke:none;fill-rule:nonzero;fill:rgb(0%,0%,89.99939%);fill-opacity:1;" d="M 91.472656 55.859375 C 91.472656 40.203125 78.78125 27.511719 63.125 27.511719 C 47.46875 27.511719 34.777344 40.203125 34.777344 55.859375 C 34.777344 71.515625 47.46875 84.207031 63.125 84.207031 C 78.78125 84.207031 91.472656 71.515625 91.472656 55.859375 Z "/>
</g>
</svg>

See https://juan.benet.ai/blog/2014-03-09-tikz2svg/

Answer 7

I've written a command line utility that automates the process described in the accepted answer.

It's called tikztosvg and it is distributed under the GPL-3 license at it's official GitHub repository. Let's say you want to convert the file example.tikz to SVG:

\begin{tikzcd}
    G \arrow[r, "\varphi"] \arrow[d, "\psi"', two heads] & H \\
    \sfrac{G}{\ker \varphi} \arrow[ru, dotted]           &
\end{tikzcd}

You could achieve that by running the following command:

$ tikztosvg -p tikz-cd -p xfrac example.tikz

The results will be stored in the file example.svg:

I'd love to have some feedback on it. Issues and PRs are very much welcomed!

Answer 8

I find it very easy to use InkScape instead of ImageMagick.

Step 1: Use the standalone class and compile the .pdf version of your TikZ picture. You don't have to put in any other class options like 'convert' and the like.
(example:\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}).

Step 2: Open the compiled pdf with InkScape instead of ImageMagick. File > Open > compiled.pdf. This will open the pdf as an SVG. You can then save it in an SVG format or export it to any other format such as png, jpeg, etc.

Also, when you open the file in InkScape, you can edit the individual components of your image. I find this very flexible to use.

Answer 9

In LuaLaTeX, there's an alternative to the accepted answer that is faster (in compilation time).

%! TEX program = lualatex
% instead of doing this...
%\documentclass[tikz, convert={outext=.svg,pdf2svg}]{standalone}
% you do the following...
\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}
\directlua{luatexbase.add_to_callback("wrapup_run", function() os.execute("pdf2svg \jobname.pdf \jobname.svg") print("Converted to SVG.") end, "final callback to convert pdf file")}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (0,0) -- (1,1);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The output is the same.

I explained what the standalone package does by default at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/671818/250119. You can see it's more efficient because it needs to spawn another lualatex process, while this method only requires spawning pdf2svg.

On my machine, this method is faster by roughly 0.8 seconds.

---

Benchmark of different methods to convert PDF to SVG

Command	Text format	Slowdown
pdf2svg b.pdf b.svg (1)	Path	1.00
mutool convert -o b.svg b.pdf && mv b1.svg b.svg	Path	1.01 ± 0.10
pdftocairo -svg b.pdf b.svg	Path	1.03 ± 0.07
dvisvgm --no-specials=ps b.dvi b.svg	Path	3.04 ± 0.45
dvisvgm --no-fonts b.dvi b.svg	Path	5.74 ± 0.37
dvisvgm b.dvi b.svg	Text	5.79 ± 0.33
dvisvgm --font-format=woff b.dvi b.svg	Text	5.81 ± 0.37
pdf2ps -dNoOutputFonts b.pdf b.ps && pstoedit -f plot-svg b.ps b.svg (2)	Path (buggy)	8.74 ± 0.49
dvisvgm --pdf b.pdf b.svg	Text	9.98 ± 0.59
pdf2ps b.pdf b.ps && pstoedit -f plot-svg b.ps b.svg	Text	11.00 ± 0.59
pdf2ps b.pdf b.ps && pstoedit -f fig b.ps b.fig && fig2dev -L svg b.fig b.svg (1, 2)	Text	11.05 ± 0.61
inkscape --export-type=svg b.pdf	Path	19.15 ± 1.06

Benchmark was done with hyperfine.

In summary: pdf2svg is the fastest, inkscape is the slowest.

Note that in order to preserve hyperlinks, in the original TeX source code, you need \usepackage[hypertex]{hyperref}.

None of the methods support preserving hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are not included in the SVG file. Refer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60750771/inkscape-pdf-to-svg-export-retain-hyperlinks

(1): Note that pdf2svg is unmaintained now, http://cityinthesky.co.uk/opensource/pdf2svg/ recommends using pdftocairo instead which is only 3% slower.

(2): Note that pstoedit is rather buggy when there is a character with a hole, and the input file has text converted to path --- the hole is filled instead of zeroed out.

Other methods

• Use tex2svg to convert from TeX to SVG with one command. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/343943/250119

• Another pdf2svg.

  https://github.com/petermr/pdf2svg | https://web.archive.org/web/20200622093615/https://bitbucket.org/petermr/pdf2svg/wiki/Home

  I didn't test this.

• Use gs (GhostScript).

  Refer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18354777/ghostscript-svg-output-device . Unfortunately the device is deprecated.