[GRASS-user] Vector drawings in PDF -> converting them

[Kurt Heston]

I have a TON of vector drawings available to me in PDF format that I'm 
georeferencing.  So far, I'm doing it by converting them to PNGs and 
using r.to.vect to massage them.  This is really tedious and the data 
isn't as clean as a straight vector conversion would be.  In 
Illustrator, I can see that all the vector math is there.  That is, the 
PDF isn't simply a wrapper around raster data.

I've tried opening the PDFs in Illustrator and exporting them as DXFs, 
but Grass ignores a lot of the data when I do this...they look very 
different in Grass once imported.  I can export them as SVG from 
Illustrator, but surprisingly, there doesn't appear to be a single 
open-source tool available out there that converts SVG into some 
mainstream GIS file format.

Does anyone have experience doing this type of conversion?  Pointers 
welcome.