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I use Google Chrome to view a 1178x5408 .svg file. It includes a lot of small "subgraphics" (screenshots of dialogs, connected by arrows .. think "wizard"), the whole thing is created by graphviz.

Now I want to print it properly. For me it is important to not scale the whole thing down to one piece of paper, since then I can not see anything of the small screenshots anymore.

What are my best options?

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You may get better responses if you specify what OS you're running. – Doug Harris Jul 8 '10 at 18:45
@Doug Harris: no. it is a general problem, i have it under all the OS i am using. – akira Jul 9 '10 at 3:27
I meant that if there's a preferred OS, then you'll get OS specific tool recommendations. Also, putting an OS tag onto the question will attract users who have that OS specified as a favorite tag. – Doug Harris Jul 9 '10 at 14:48
i can't put enough OS tags on it, i am interested in get the problem solved on all OS :) – akira Jul 9 '10 at 18:36
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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

I suggest you use Inkscape to open the SVG file and print it from there. It has far better options on printing than Chrome does for SVG.

Shift + Ctrl + D will get you document options:

Document Options

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To amplify BloodPhilla, it certainly is puzzling that the SVG format - where "S" stands for Scalable should have a "natural" width and height specified in the <svg> tag. Although Inkscape is a good tool, if desperate you can always open an .svg in your favorite editor and change the dimensions in the opening tag. – msw Jul 8 '10 at 14:09
@msw - That would corrupt your SVG image because it would throw of poportions. – BloodPhilia Jul 8 '10 at 14:56
good answer, that was one of my approaches as well, didn't worked out so well. inkscape was printing only the first page, iirc. i will check again. – akira Jul 9 '10 at 3:32
no, it won't, since properties are referenced to the viewport size, not the image's dimension. – stevenvh Aug 10 '10 at 15:53
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up vote 1 down vote

You could try to use the latest version of GhostPDL (sister application to Ghostscript; source code available from http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript) to convert the file to PDF. GhostPDL can handle SVG (and XPS or PCL) in a similar way as Ghostscript does handle PostScript. So here goes the commandline:

gsvg.exe ^
    -dNOPAUSE ^
    -dBATCH ^
    -dSAFER ^
    -sOutputFile=my.pdf ^
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
    -g1178x5408 ^
    c:/path/to/my.svg

Once you got a PDF, you should be able to print it easily from Acrobat{,Reader}. At least now with PDF we know different ways to reliably print one big-dimension file onto multiple sheets of (letter or A4 or A3) paper using a "posterize" utility.

Maybe such a "poster print" function is also available from Inkscape (which can open and print the SVG directly), but I'm not sure from the top of my head.

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any tricks to embed the referenced .png files into the .pdf? – akira Jul 12 '10 at 9:50
@akira: Sorry, I do not understand your question. Which .png do you talk about? – pipitas Jul 13 '10 at 6:11
"It includes a lot of small "subgraphics" (screenshots of dialogs, connected by arrows .. think "wizard")" .. i speak of the .png images which are referenced by the .svg – akira Jul 13 '10 at 6:16
@akira: you didn't state in your initial question, that the graphics were .png files, and that they were not embedded in the .svg... -- So when you print the .svg to PDF, you do not see the .pngs included in the PDF pages?! What kind of reference is used? Is it internet-based, or local file system-based? Is it using absolute or relative paths? – pipitas Jul 17 '10 at 15:43
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ok, i used wkhtmltopdf to get a reasonable, good looking .pdf from that .svg:

% wkhtmltopdf.exe input.svg output.pdf
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