svgclip

Sometimes you have an SVG file and you want to reduce its size to the actual drawing. I had a hard time finding a good way to do this programmatically, so I wrote this program back in 2013.

This is now possible to do only with the help of inkscape itself, according to commenters in this issue:

inkscape --export-type=svg -o test_cropped.svg --export-area-drawing ./test.svg

There is therefore little need for this program.

Another alternative is vpype.

Original README contents

Googling around, one method I've found is to use Inkscape. It can be scripted like this:

inkscape --verb=FitCanvasToDrawing --verb=FileSave --verb=FileClose *.svg

That takes a long time, opens up a GUI and isn't very flexible.

However, you can also get information about the bounding box with the --query-all option to inkscape. Using this information, I wrote a python script that uses rsvg and cairo to write the drawing to a file with the right dimensions.

Since it was easy, I also added an option to add a margin to the drawing.

Requirements

apt-get install inkscape gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 python-gi-cairo

Usage

svgclip.py inputfile -o outputfile [-m marginpixels]

Regards, Simon Kågedal Reimer