Sometimes you have an SVG file and you want to reduce its size to the actual drawing. I have had a hard time finding a good way to do this programmatically, for batch processing or other.

Googling around, one method I've found is to use Inkscape. It can be scripted like this:

inkscape --verb=FitCanvasToDrawing --verb=FileSave --verb=FileClose *.svg

That takes a long time, opens up a GUI and isn't very flexible.

However, you can also get information about the bounding box with the --query-all option to inkscape. Using this information, I wrote a python script that uses rsvg and cairo to write the drawing to a file with the right dimensions.

Since it was easy, I also added an option to add a margin to the drawing.

Make sure you have Inkscape, python-rsvg and python-cairo installed (on Ubuntu, try sudo apt-get install inkscape python-rsvg python-cairo) and then run svgclip.py inputfile -o outputfile [-m marginpixels].

Regards, Simon Kågedal Reimer