When I export a diagram to PDF with a SVG symbol, the result is blury

Question

I haven't noticed this before because I usually use built-in shapes to build diagrams.

But for a new project I needed some special symbols (SVGs) that I could insert perfectly on the palette.

The weird thing is that when zooming directly on yEd itself, the SVG symbol scales perfect. But when exporting to PDF, when zooming, the built-in shapes don't lose qualtiy; however, the SVGs, do.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm saying ...

Any idea on what to do to solve this? I'm using Ubuntu 20.04

Thanks!

Answer 1

When exporting SVG nodes to a PDF document, the corresponding SVG documents are embedded as raster images in the resulting PDF document.

The only workaround for this issue is exporting to SVG instead of exporting to PDF. You might be able to get a PDF document without embedded raster images, if you try to convert the yEd-created SVG document with a dedicated SVG editor application such as Inkscape.

Comments

thanks, thomas. A little cumbersome but it works. As you say, I need to export the whole yEd diagram first to svg (disabling first the grid, otherwise it gets exported as well) and then open the svg file with, in my case, LibreDraw, to finally export it as a PDF.

I mean, this is ok if there are only a few images that will have to undergo this process. But for many, it's like doing the same thing, twice.

thanks!

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I understand that this process is not convenient at all. Unfortunately, supporting SVG for PDF export is very much out-of-scope for us. Both features are realized through independent 3rd party libraries. They are included in yEd for the specific reason that we did not have to develop support for PDF and SVG ourselves.