SVG to PNG / JPEG

Work backwards from the largest place it will appear, then allow for high-density screens, where a 200-pixel slot is drawn with 400 or 600 real pixels. The scale is a multiplier of the SVG's own width and height rather than an absolute figure, so a file declared at 100 × 50 comes out at 200 × 100 at scale 2 and 1,000 × 500 at the maximum of 10. The arrows move in half steps between 0.5 and 10. When you need an exact target such as 512 pixels square and no multiplier lands on it, change the width and height in the markup first.

Two causes, worth telling apart. If it looks soft, something is displaying it larger than it was exported — the extra pixels are invented at that point, and the only cure is a bigger export. If it looks crisp but the edges are chewed, it was exported small: a diagonal or a curve is approximated by whole pixels, and hairline strokes under a pixel wide either vanish or thicken. Artwork drawn for a poster rarely survives at 32 pixels. Export generously and let whatever displays it shrink the result — the direction that costs nothing.

PNG for logos, icons and flat colour, which is most of what starts life as SVG: lossless, keeps transparency, compresses solid areas well. JPEG cannot store transparency at all, so anything transparent is composited onto white before the file is written — invisible on a white page, obvious anywhere else. It suits photographic content, which SVG rarely holds. WebP gives a smaller file at similar quality and is widely supported in browsers, though older email clients and desktop applications are patchier — the wrong pick for a file that must open anywhere. Both lossy formats are written at a quality of 0.92, with no slider.

Because text in an SVG is usually a font name rather than a shape. The renderer looks that name up on the machine doing the drawing, and a font referenced from the web is not fetched while an SVG is rendered as an image — so you get a substitute, with different letter widths that shift the layout, or nothing where a missing glyph should be. The fix is upstream: in your vector editor, convert text to outlines or paths before exporting, after which the letters are shapes that render identically everywhere. Keep an editable copy, because outlined text can no longer be retyped.

That is the fallback used when the browser cannot measure the file. An SVG whose root element carries no width and height attributes has no intrinsic size, and 300 × 150 is the default size of a replaced element in CSS — so that is what your scale multiplies. The fix is to add explicit width and height to the markup, or a viewBox giving the drawing a coordinate space. A percentage width behaves the same as none at all. If the file cannot be drawn at all, you are told so, with the same advice about width, height and viewBox.

Browsers cap how big a canvas may be, the cap differs between them, and no API reports it — Safari on iOS is the tightest in common use, around 4096 by 4096 pixels. Past the limit the drawing surface raises no error; it quietly returns an empty result, which is how other converters hand you a download that is a broken image. The result is checked rather than assumed, so an export beyond the cap says so, gives the dimensions it attempted, and suggests a lower scale to retry at. Memory is the other ceiling, and it can stop a tab first.

No. A dropped file is read by the browser itself, the markup is drawn and encoded on your own machine, and the finished image reaches the download link as data the page already holds. Nothing goes out behind the Convert button. One consequence is worth spelling out for anyone converting a client's artwork: because external references are not fetched, an SVG carrying a link to a remote image or font causes no call to that server, so nobody learns the file was opened. That same silence is why those resources are missing from the output.

Not by reversing this. Going from vector to pixels discards the shapes, and nothing in the pixels records where an outline was. What exists is tracing, which guesses at edges of similar colour and draws paths around them — reasonable for a flat two-colour logo, poor for anything with soft edges, and hopeless for a photograph, where it produces thousands of blobs in a file larger than the original. If you need a vector, hunt for the original artwork: an .ai, .eps, .pdf or .svg from whoever made it beats any trace of a screenshot.