excalidraw_export v1.0.3

excalidraw_export

This is a simple Node package to export Excalidraw drawings to SVG, and optionally PDF (requires rsvg-convert).

Install

npm install --global excalidraw_export

Use

Simplest is as follows.

excalidraw_export foo.excalidraw bar.excalidraw

This will create two files: foo.excalidraw.svg and bar.excalidraw.svg.

If you have rsvg-convert installed, and you additionally want PDF files use

excalidraw_export --pdf foo.excalidraw bar.excalidraw

This will also generate foo.excalidraw.pdf and bar.excalidraw.pdf.

Fonts

Unfortunately the font situation is a bit of a mess. Excalidraw uses two fonts - Virgil and Cascadia. By default it references them using CSS like this:

<defs>
  <style>
    @font-face {
      font-family: "Virgil";
      src: url("https://excalidraw.com/Virgil.woff2");
    }
    @font-face {
      font-family: "Cascadia";
      src: url("https://excalidraw.com/Cascadia.woff2");
    }
  </style>
</defs>
<text font-family="Virgil, Segoe UI Emoji" ...

This means the file is small, but now you need network access to use the fonts! Not great. So this tool provides a --embed-fonts option which will embed the fonts in the SVG (even if they aren't used). This increases the file size a bit (so you probably don't want to use it on the web) but it's good for e.g. HTML presentations.

Unfortunately there's a big downside of <style> @font-face. No SVG renderers except web browsers support CSS fonts in SVG. ImageMagick, rsvg-convert, Inkscape, etc. will all ignore it.

Therefore if you want to convert to PDF while retaining fonts you have to install the actual Virgil and Cascadia fonts on your system. Then rsvg-convert works fine.

However there is one minor snag - the actual fonts are called Virgil GS and Cascadia Code. So this tool has another option --rename-fonts which will change the font-familys like so:

<text font-family="Virgil SG, Segoe UI Emoji" ...

This lets it find the system font.

Troubleshooting

If you get an error like this:

npm ERR! ../src/Image.h:18:10: fatal error: 'gif_lib.h' file not found
npm ERR! #include <gif_lib.h>
npm ERR!          ^~~~~~~~~~~
npm ERR! 1 warning and 1 error generated.

See this thread for suggestions.