An SVG is a list of drawing instructions: paths, colours, text and coordinates written in XML. A PNG is a fixed grid of pixels. Converting one to the other means rendering the instructions once, at one particular size, and saving the result. Almost every problem with this conversion comes down to two questions: how large the PNG should be, and whether the renderer has everything the SVG refers to.
Why people convert SVG to PNG
- Uploads that refuse SVG. Many e-shop and marketplace image fields, social network profile pictures and CMS media libraries accept only bitmaps. SVG can contain scripts, so upload forms often block it on purpose.
- E-mail. Gmail and desktop Outlook do not display SVG reliably, which is why logos in e-mail signatures and newsletters are nearly always PNG.
- Exact pixel sizes. Favicons, app icons and store graphics are specified in pixels.
- A frozen look. An SVG depends on the viewer's fonts and its support for filters and CSS. A PNG looks identical everywhere.
How our converter renders the SVG
We render your file at 150 DPI. Like web browsers and the SVG standard, our converter counts 96 user units (px) per inch, so 150 DPI means each SVG pixel becomes 1.5625 PNG pixels. Sizes in mm, cm or pt are converted through the same inch.
| SVG document size | PNG result |
|---|---|
| 24 × 24 px icon | about 38 × 38 px |
| 640 × 480 px | 1000 × 750 px |
| A4 page, 210 × 297 mm | 1240 × 1754 px |
| A0 poster, 841 × 1189 mm | 4967 × 7022 px |
The exported area is the page defined by the width, height and viewBox attributes, not the bounding box of the drawing. Objects lying outside the page are cut off and empty margins stay. If the file has only a viewBox, its numbers are taken as pixels. The PNG is RGBA with 8 bits per channel and carries 150 DPI in its header, so it lands at the intended physical size when you place it in a print document.
Transparency is kept: wherever nothing is drawn, the PNG is transparent. A white background appears only if the SVG draws one itself or was saved in Inkscape with an opaque page colour. Filters such as blur and drop shadows are rasterised at the same 150 DPI.
Fonts, linked images and other external references
The conversion runs on our server with no internet access, and it receives only the single file you upload.
- Fonts. Text in an SVG stores only a font name. If that font is not installed, a substitute is used and the text changes width, overflows boxes or overlaps. Available are DejaVu, Liberation (metric-compatible with Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New), Carlito and Caladea (compatible with Calibri and Cambria), URW clones of Helvetica, Times and the other PostScript base fonts, and the Noto family including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Brand fonts such as Montserrat or Roboto, and web fonts loaded with
@font-face, are not. The reliable fix is to convert text to outlines before export: Path → Object to Path in Inkscape, Type → Create Outlines in Illustrator, or the Outline text export option in Figma. - Linked images. A bitmap referenced as
href="photo.jpg"or by a path on your disk is not part of the upload and will be missing. Images onhttps://addresses are not downloaded either. Images embedded as base64data:URIs work. Inkscape embeds linked images via Extensions → Images → Embed Images. - HTML inside SVG. Diagram tools often put labels into
<foreignObject>as HTML. Our converter does not render that, so you get the plain fallback text, sometimes with the note „Viewer does not support full SVG 1.1“. Switch off formatted (HTML) labels before exporting the diagram. - Animation and scripts are ignored. The PNG shows the initial state.
Common problems after converting SVG to PNG
The PNG is too small or blurry
The output is always 1.5625 times the SVG's own size, and you cannot choose another one here. For a specific width, scale the document before uploading: a 512 px wide PNG needs an SVG 327.68 px wide (keep the viewBox unchanged, only change width and height). For icon sets in many sizes, Inkscape's Export dialog or inkscape --export-width=512 icon.svg on your computer is the better tool.
The background is black instead of transparent
The PNG is transparent; some image viewers draw the transparent area as black. Open it in a browser to check. If you need a solid white background, convert the PNG on to JPG, which fills transparency with white.
Part of the drawing is missing
Those objects lie outside the page. In Inkscape, select everything (Ctrl+A) and use Edit → Resize Page to Selection (Shift+Ctrl+R).
SVG and PNG in brief
SVG is a W3C standard: version 1.0 became a Recommendation in September 2001, 1.1 in 2003, and the 1.1 Second Edition from August 2011 is still the version most tools implement fully (specification). PNG was designed in the mid-1990s as a patent-free replacement for GIF, became a W3C Recommendation in October 1996 and an international standard as ISO/IEC 15948:2004. Its Third Edition, published by the W3C in June 2025, adds official support for animated PNG and HDR (Library of Congress description).
| SVG | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | vector shapes and text in XML | pixels, lossless compression |
| Scaling | sharp at any size | fixed resolution |
| Transparency | yes | yes, full alpha channel |
| Text | editable, depends on installed fonts | part of the image |
Other ways to get a PNG
If you have Inkscape installed, exporting there gives you full control over size and area. Any browser can display an SVG, but a screenshot only gives you screen resolution. Our converter is useful when you have no software at hand, work on a phone, or need to process up to 10 files at once and download them as one ZIP.