SVG vs DXF vs EPS vs PDF

The short answer

Send SVG to someone who will edit it or put it on a website. Send PDF to a printer or to anyone whose software you do not know. Send EPS when a print shop or RIP asks for it by name. Send DXF to a machine — laser, router, plotter, plasma.

If you already know which one you need, that is the whole guide. The rest is why, and what each format quietly drops.

SVG

SVG is XML. You can open it in a text editor and read it, which is genuinely useful when something is wrong: a path is a path, a fill is a hex code, and a mis-scaled drawing is one attribute.

It is the only one of the four that browsers render natively, so it is the default for anything on the web. Editors all read it. Newer cutting software reads it too.

What it does not carry well is physical units. SVG has a user coordinate system and a viewBox, and while it can express millimetres, plenty of software ignores that and assumes pixels at 96 per inch. For anything that will be cut or printed at a specific size, confirm the size at the other end rather than trusting the file.

PDF

PDF carries the same paths plus a real page: a size, a media box, and print metadata. That is why printers ask for it — the page is part of the file rather than something the recipient has to guess.

Everyone can open a PDF, which makes it the safest handoff format when you do not know what the recipient uses. Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer and Acrobat all edit it.

The trap is the same one as everywhere else: a PDF can be a scan. A PDF containing a bitmap is not vector artwork, however sharp the bitmap was.

EPS

EPS is a single-artwork PostScript program with a bounding box. It predates SVG by roughly a decade and survives because print workflows were built around PostScript and still work.

If a screen printer, sign shop or RIP asks for EPS, send EPS. It is not a quality question — the outlines are identical to the SVG — it is that their software takes it and has taken it for twenty years.

EPS can also embed a raster, and an EPS with a bitmap inside is the classic "this is not vector" rejection. Open it once before sending and click an edge.

DXF

DXF is the odd one out: it describes geometry and layers, and it has no fills. That is not a limitation, it is the point. A cutter needs to know where the tool goes, and a fill is meaningless to a blade.

DXF carries real drawing units, so a drawing has a physical size before it reaches the machine. That is why it is the right format for cutting: the size you set is the size that gets cut, with no ambiguity about pixels per inch.

Version matters more here than with the others. The exporter targets AutoCAD R2000 (AC1015), which is what most cutter, CAM and sign software lists as its safe import version. Newer DXF revisions add entities a cutter never uses and lose compatibility with importers written once and never revisited.

What each one drops

DXF drops colour as a fill — colour becomes a layer property — and drops anything that is not geometry. Plan for that: send a cut file and a print file separately rather than expecting one to carry both.

EPS drops nothing important for print, but it also gains nothing over PDF except acceptance. Choose it because it was asked for.

SVG drops certainty about physical size. PDF drops easy hand editing outside a design application. None of them drops the outlines, which is why converting between them later is cheap and converting from a raster is not.

One document, several writers

When a trace produces a document, the export formats are writers over that one document rather than four separate traces. The path data, the node count and the palette are identical in all of them.

That matters when a job needs two of them — a DXF for the plotter and an EPS for the RIP, say. Export both from the same trace, and the cut lines up with the print because they came from the same geometry rather than from two runs that made slightly different decisions.