I love the powerful LaTeX drawing package TikZ and use it whenever I can, in particular for creating SVGs. Converting from PDF to SVG with Inkscape usually gives good results, visually — but what if the structure of the XML is important, as well?
For example, you may want to manually tweak the arrangement of certain elements in Inkscape.
For this, it is important that SVG groups are meaningful or at least not harmful.
Unfortunately, as I describe
on tex.SE,
the lualatex+Inkscape pipeline can create pathological group arrangements that are a pain to work with.
Helpful user
AlexG
reminded me
of the dvilualatex+dvisvgm pipeline.
Given that
dvisvgm
has specifically been developed to consume LaTeX-generated files,
it is certainly worth a shot!
And indeed, we can instrument the DVI by inserting special LaTeX commands in the source:
\special{dvisvgm:raw <g id="My Group">}
% any code
\special{dvisvgm:raw </g>}The intermediate DVI looks just the same, but now dvisvgm knows to inject the given SVG snippets into its output.
 | Some tweaking of the dvisvgm call may be necessary depending on your document.
For instance, I needed to add --no-fonts to force it to convert text into SVG paths
instead of trying to include the font, which did not work in my setup. |
