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Show HN: Sfsym – Export Apple SF Symbols as Vector SVG/PDF/PNG

15 pointsby olliewagnertoday at 3:44 AM3 commentsview on HN

I found myself reaching for SF Symbols' 'Copy Image As…' quite often during agentic design sessions, so I made a command-line tool that the agent can use by itself. It exports Apple SF Symbols as SVG, PDF, or PNG.

The vector paths come directly from macOS's symbol renderer. Internally it reaches a private ivar on NSSymbolImageRep to get the CUINamedVectorGlyph, draws into a CGPDFContext, then walks the PDF content stream back out as SVG `d` commands. The output matches what the system draws, rather than an approximation traced from rasters.

A few things about it:

- Every subcommand accepts `--json`, and `sfsym schema` returns a machine-readable description of the whole CLI. - Symbol enumeration reads the OS's Assets.car BOM tree, so the list of 8,300+ names stays current with macOS updates without a version table in the binary. - Each SVG `<path>` carries a `data-layer` attribute, so you can retheme in CSS without touching geometry.

It's been saving me a bunch of clicking. Please let me know if you have any other ideas for it.


Comments

difosfortoday at 12:19 PM

But these are copyright by Apple so are you allowed to use them on your commercial websites and apps?

ameliustoday at 12:15 PM

For those wondering what SF symbols are:

https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/

This is not my iconset of choice, though.

tasoeurtoday at 10:37 AM

This is great! I found myself asking my AI agents to generate those icons every so often (esp. for websites), so thank you for taking the time to build this.

Quick question, are you also planning on supporting animations?