In reference to a mailing list discussion

On 04/02/16 05:58, Pierre-Luc Samuel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A long time ago, cairo implemented the SVG 1.2 draft with support for
> multipage, so pdftocairo complies with that and submits an entire PDF
> document to be rendered into 1 SVG file.  However, no existing svg
> viewer can open these files because SVG 1.2 was never adopted by W3C and
> was actually dropped in 2005 in favor of development of SVG 2.0.  See
> https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/svg#obsolete
>
> Inkscape has scapped their own plans of supporting multi-page SVG since
> it's not supported by any current SVG specification, and SVG 2.0 doesn't
> look like it will have multi-page either
> http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Multipage
>
> So, I would be willing to prepare a patch to have SVG treated like other
> single-page image files, so that calling pdftocairo would generate many
> SVG 1.1 files.  Libcairo already has a
> cairo_svg_surface_restrict_to_version() method.
>
> Would you be interested in such a patch?

Adrian Johnson wrote:

I think it would be best to add a "-split" option (applicable to all
vector outputs) for creating one file per page. Changing the default svg
output to one file per page would be a significant change to the
pdftocairo behavior that would break any existing scripts that use
"pdftocairo -svg".

Using a -split option also leaves open the possibility changing the
current multipage svg to whichever multipage option Inkscape chooses to
implement.

We can also change the pdftocairo svg version to 1.1 now that 1.2 is
obsolete.