Inkscape in CLI: FitCanvasToDrawing with margin parameters

Question

I have many files created with adobe illustrator (.ai) on A4 canvas size, and I would like to convert (in CLI) to SVG file to allow their use in a website.

A basic conversion works by running, for example :
inkscape myFile.ai --export-area-drawing --export-plain-svg myFile.svg

My issue is the option export-area-drawing (or verb FitCanvasToDrawing) doesn't let any margin, so display in web page is not nice.

Like GUI properties which allow to add margins, I would like to do the same in CLI, adding 20 pixels on up/down/left/right margins, as capture below at right instead of left

Is there a way to do that using Inkscape in CLI?

I read https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Using_the_Command_Line, https://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html, tried to change fit-margin-… in file without success.

Of course, I can change website CSS to add

img {
    position: relative;
    top: 20px;
    left: 20px;
}

But if we open file in other way, the display stays bad, and if CSS framework change…

I also read on post https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/6670/144183 there is librsvg

I am using Inkscape v1.1.1 installed by snap under Ubuntu 18.04

Answer 1

Marc JM answer :
inkscape --export-area-drawing --export-margin 20 input.ai -o output.svg
works fine on the v1.1.1 installed on my computer

Answer 2

Update:

The question was not clear at the first glance and one may think that export-area-drawing action doesn't work with export-margin. So you can invoke Inkscape as follows:

inkscape myFile.ai --actions="export-area-drawing;export-margin:50;export-type:svg;export-plain-svg; export-do" -o myFile.svg

Old answer:

In Inkscape 1.2-dev there is the action fit-canvas-to-selection. To specify the export margin use the export-margin action.

The following command should work as expected:

inkscape myFile.ai --actions="select-all;fit-canvas-to-selection;export-margin:50;export-type:svg;export-plain-svg; export-do" -o myFile.svg

The other actions in that command are self-explanatory.

If that doesn't work for some reason, there is another workaround:

• Use Inkscape to convert your *.ai files to PDF.
• use pdfcrop utility to crop the PDF documents with custom margins. check pdfcrop --help for examples. If you don't have it already installed, try:

  sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils 
  

• Convert the PDF documents to plain SVG using Inkscape.