pdftocairo

pdftocairo is a command-line utility that converts PDF and PostScript documents to other formats using the Cairo graphics library. It is part of the Poppler utilities package, which accompanies the Poppler PDF rendering library used by many Linux distributions and other platforms.

The tool renders each page of the input into a separate output file, selecting the target format with a device option. Supported formats include raster PNG images and vector formats such as PostScript (PS), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Usage and options: The typical invocation is pdftocairo [options] input.pdf output. Page range can be controlled with -f (first page) and -l (last page). The output device is chosen with options such as -png, -svg, -ps, or -eps; the resulting files are named with the given root and the page number (for example, output-1.png, output-2.png, or output-1.svg, etc.).

Additional options commonly control resolution and other rendering parameters. The tool is cross-platform within the Poppler ecosystem and serves as a straightforward way to extract pages as images or vector graphics, suitable for tasks such as publishing, annotation, or lightweight document processing.