How to convert an SVG string into a jpg with Inkscape

Question

After having spent two days attempting to rasterize jpeg's from SVG strings using ImageMagick I have finally given up.

Although I managed to get the actual conversion working fine it seems Imagemagick cannot properly convert the transform/rotate features correctly when rendering the image, leaving the output different to the original SVG.

Having researched further it appears that this is a known issue and that 'Inkscape' is the best method to use for converting SVG into jpeg/png in PHP.

The problem is that my SVG data is sent to my PHP script via JSON. How do I get a blob or string into the Inkscape command line in order to have it converted?

Many thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

If you have an SVG string, and you're sending it from the browser to the server via AJAX, you'll need to write it to a temp file, so it can be referenced from the Inkscape command line. You can't render to JPEG using the Inkscape command line, but you can render to PNG easily, and if you really need a different format, of course you can convert using ImageMagick subsequently.

You'll need something like:

/path/to/inkscape \
    --without-gui \
    --export-png=/path/to/output.png \
    /tmp/file/input.svg

If you are accepting full/partial SVG input from the user, bear in mind there are a good number of security issues you need to bear in mind. Happy to expand on this if required.