Sometimes you have an SVG file and you want to reduce its size to the actual drawing. I had a hard time finding a good way to do this programmatically, so I wrote this program back in 2013.
This is now possible to do only with the help of inkscape itself, according to commenters in this issue:
inkscape --export-type=svg -o test_cropped.svg --export-area-drawing ./test.svg
There is therefore little need for this program.
Another alternative is vpype.
Googling around, one method I've found is to use Inkscape. It can be scripted like this:
inkscape --verb=FitCanvasToDrawing --verb=FileSave --verb=FileClose *.svg
That takes a long time, opens up a GUI and isn't very flexible.
However, you can also get information about the bounding box with the
--query-all option to inkscape. Using this information, I wrote a python
script that uses rsvg and cairo to write the drawing to a file with the
right dimensions.
Since it was easy, I also added an option to add a margin to the drawing.
apt-get install inkscape gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 python-gi-cairo
svgclip.py inputfile -o outputfile [-m marginpixels]
Regards, Simon Kågedal Reimer