REVIEW HANDOUT: AN SVG ILLUSTRATION IN A ONE-PAGE PDF

Files for "Create a PDF Handout from an Original SVG Illustration" on
svgai.org. Made in October 2026.

FILES
handout.html: The handout: a heading, a five-step list, an example
comment, a box of checks and a credit line.
handout.css: The styles: the fonts, the page (@page: A4, 16 mm top and
bottom margins, 18 mm side margins), print-color-adjust, ligatures
off, and an @media screen block that only styles the on-screen
preview (a white A4 sheet on grey). It does not change the PDF.
assets/review-original.svg: The illustration as exported from SVG AI,
unchanged.
assets/review-fit.svg: The copy the handout uses; see THE
ILLUSTRATION.
fonts/Montserrat-Regular.ttf, fonts/Montserrat-SemiBold.ttf,
fonts/Montserrat-Bold.ttf: The text font (see THE FONT).
fonts/OFL.txt: The font licence.
review-handout.pdf: The PDF printed from these files with Chrome 155:
one A4 page, 37,515 bytes.
check-results.json: What was checked in the PDFs, and the results.

THE ILLUSTRATION
The "review" scene of Papertrail, a fictional document workspace. It
was generated with SVG AI on October 4, 2026 (Ultra, one SVG,
transparent background) for
https://www.svgai.org/blog/matching-svg-feature-illustrations
where its prompt is published.
review-original.svg is the untouched export. review-fit.svg changes
only preserveAspectRatio="none" to "xMidYMid meet"; every other byte
is the same. Both files have the same bytes as the copies published
with that article (checked with curl on October 22, 2026):
review-original.svg sha256
9374b574b3258ee0fc0c6efb45e60d8ebe3be352829d5e69ba99b9666b93cad9
review-fit.svg sha256
6c19ad22578897290aa8716c39edc9026872bd6e2d29ab4b79ad63dbe71ffc5b
The handout shows it with <img>, not as a CSS background. The <img>
printed in every test. In a Chrome test, a copy of the page with the
SVG as a CSS background image lost the illustration with background
printing off, unless print-color-adjust: exact applied to it.

THE FONT
Montserrat Regular (400), SemiBold (600) and Bold (700): static
TrueType instances made with fontTools (varLib.instancer) from the
Montserrat variable font, Version 8.000. Copyright 2011 The Montserrat
Project Authors. SIL Open Font License 1.1; OFL.txt is included. The
font declares no Reserved Font Name, so the instances keep the name
Montserrat.
Why static files: Chrome embedded them as three TrueType font
subsets of 14 to 17 KB. The same page set in the variable font became
29 Type 3 fonts with no embedded font program, in a 156,106-byte PDF.

TO MAKE THE PDF
On Windows with Chrome or Edge, open Command Prompt in this folder and
run one of these commands (each is one line).
Chrome:
"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --headless --no-pdf-header-footer --user-data-dir="%TEMP%\handout-pdf-chrome" --print-to-pdf="%CD%\handout.pdf" "%CD%\handout.html"
Edge:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --headless --no-pdf-header-footer --user-data-dir="%TEMP%\handout-pdf-edge" --print-to-pdf="%CD%\handout-edge.pdf" "%CD%\handout.html"
The same Chrome command in PowerShell:
& "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --headless --no-pdf-header-footer --user-data-dir="$env:TEMP\handout-pdf-chrome" --print-to-pdf="$PWD\handout.pdf" "$PWD\handout.html"
The paths are where the browsers were installed on the test machine;
change them if yours are elsewhere. The command can return before the
PDF is written, so wait until the file appears in this folder (it took
from about 2 to 16 seconds in the tests). If no PDF appears within a
minute, run the command again with a new profile folder name, for
example handout-pdf-chrome2: in one test run no PDF was written.
--headless prints without opening a window. Keep
--no-pdf-header-footer: without it, Chrome added the date, the time
and the page title at the top of the page, and the file's full
location (file:///C:/...) and "1/1" at the bottom. --user-data-dir
makes the browser use a throwaway profile folder instead of your
everyday one. Delete that folder after the browser has closed. The
headless browser can keep running after it has written the PDF: it
usually closed within a minute, but a few runs took longer, and in one
test it was still running more than two minutes later. If the delete
command says the files are in use, wait a minute and run it again:
rmdir /s /q "%TEMP%\handout-pdf-chrome"
or, in PowerShell:
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:TEMP\handout-pdf-chrome"
(handout-pdf-edge for Edge, and the same for any other profile folder
name you used). If the files are still in use after several minutes,
leave the folder and delete it after you next restart the computer;
it only holds the throwaway profile.
Chrome's command line printed the cream box with or without
print-color-adjust. With background printing switched off (tested
with Playwright's page.pdf in the same Chrome), the box printed with
print-color-adjust: exact and was painted white without it.

US LETTER
In handout.css, change size: A4 to size: letter in the @page rule.
Tested with Chrome: one 8.5 x 11 inch page (612 x 792 points) with
the same margins. The on-screen preview stays A4-wide; it does not affect the
PDF.

TESTED
Chrome 155.0.8059.80 and Edge 155.0.4283.62 on Windows 11 Pro, with
the commands above. Both PDFs: one page of 594.96 x 841.92 points
(Chrome's A4, 209.9 x 297.0 mm); three embedded TrueType font subsets
with ToUnicode maps and no Type 3 fonts; no images, because the
illustration is 23 filled vector paths in the SVG's 6 fill colours;
the extracted text matches the HTML, with no ligature characters; the
link; tags, with /Lang en and the image's alt text as the Figure's
/Alt; no header, footer or local path; the content area starts 17.99
mm from the left and 15.87 mm from the top. Chrome and Edge made the
same PDF apart from the Creator line and the timestamps, so only
Chrome's PDF is included. The three commands above were also run, as
written, in a folder extracted from this ZIP (with spaces in its
path): each PDF was the same as the checked one apart from its
timestamps, and the clean-up commands removed the profile folders.
The one-change copies described above (US Letter, the variable font,
the CSS background image, background printing off) were printed with
Chrome only.

NOT TESTED
The print dialog (Ctrl+P, Save as PDF) and its default settings;
other browsers and apps (Firefox, Safari, Word, Google Docs, Inkscape,
Microsoft Print to PDF); macOS and Linux; a physical print; PDF/UA,
WCAG or any accessibility checker, and screen readers (the tags were
only inspected); CMYK, colour profiles, bleed and PDF/X.

The handout's layout and text, the font instances and the checks were
made by an AI coding agent. SVG AI generated only the illustration.
