Convert SVG to PDF

Thanks to Adrian for showing how the Batik rasterizer API is supposed to be used. However, I needed a more lightweight solution— I can’t write to temporary files, and I want fewer dependencies. So, starting from the methods he pointed to, I found a way to access the lower-level code to do the conversion and nothing else.

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;

import org.apache.batik.transcoder.Transcoder;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderException;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderInput;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderOutput;
import org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] argv) throws TranscoderException, FileNotFoundException {
        Transcoder transcoder = new PDFTranscoder();
        TranscoderInput transcoderInput = new TranscoderInput(new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/test.svg")));
        TranscoderOutput transcoderOutput = new TranscoderOutput(new FileOutputStream(new File("/tmp/test.pdf")));
        transcoder.transcode(transcoderInput, transcoderOutput);
    }
}

The compile-and-run commands are

javac -cp batik-rasterizer.jar -d build Test.java
java -cp build:batik-rasterizer.jar Test

The important point is that TranscoderInput and TranscoderOutput can work with any InputStream and OutputStream, not just file streams. Note that one of the constructors takes a org.w3c.dom.Document, which means that you don’t even need to serialize an SVG DOM into an SVG string, saving an additional step.

This version also doesn’t write anything to stdout/stderr, unlike the high-level API.

For JPEG, PNG, or TIFF output, replace org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder with org.apache.batik.transcoder.image.JPEGTranscoder, PNGTranscoder, or TIFFTranscoder (note that these raster formats are in a different package).

(I’m not quite sure how Java finds the org.apache.batk.transcoder.* and org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder classes, since I don’t see them in the batik-rasterizer.jar.)

Edit:

Although the simple commandline-compilation works with the batik-rasterizer.jar only, it’s doing some sort of classloader magic to find all the necessary classes. In a more realistic case (building a project with Ant), you have to find the classes by hand. They can be found in batik-1.7.zip from the Batik project and fop-1.1.zip from the FOP project. From Batik, you need to compile with batik-transcoder.jar and run with

• batik-transcoder.jar
• batik-anim.jar
• batik-awt-util.jar
• batik-bridge.jar
• batik-css.jar
• batik-dom.jar
• batik-ext.jar
• batik-gvt.jar
• batik-parser.jar
• batik-script.jar
• batik-svg-dom.jar
• batik-util.jar
• batik-xml.jar
• xml-apis-ext.jar

From FOP, you need to compile with fop.jar and run with

• fop.jar
• avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar
• xmlgraphics-commons-1.5.jar