Documents

Use a SkiaSharp document canvas when drawing should be serialized to a file or stream instead of rendered into an SKSurface. You still draw with an SKCanvas, but the document canvas encodes those draw calls as PDF, SVG, or XPS output in a caller-supplied stream.

Start with PDF for multi-page output unless the consumer specifically requires XPS. Choose SVG when you need one scalable vector graphic represented as XML.

Choose a format

Format	Use when	Canvas lifecycle	Main constraint
PDF	You need portable, multi-page document output	Create an SKDocument, call BeginPage and EndPage for each page, then call Close	Page dimensions use points; close the document before reading the completed output
SVG	You need one scalable vector graphic or SVG markup	Create an SKCanvas with SKSvgCanvas.Create, draw your content, then dispose the canvas	There is no page lifecycle; the SVG is not complete until the canvas is disposed
XPS	A Windows workflow specifically requires XPS output	Use the same SKDocument page lifecycle as PDF	Requires the Windows XPS Object Model and COM; creation returns null where unavailable

PDF and XPS page sizes use point units, where 72 points equal one inch. Their raster DPI options control how drawing operations without a native document representation are rasterized; DPI does not change the page coordinate system.

How document canvases differ from surfaces

An SKSurface exposes pixels in CPU memory or a GPU resource. You can snapshot it, read its pixels, or present it through a view. A document canvas instead serializes draw calls to an output stream. The public document workflow has no surface to snapshot or read back.

This distinction lets you reuse drawing code. Put the drawing itself in a method that accepts SKCanvas, then call it with a surface canvas, a document page canvas, or an SVG canvas as appropriate. Keep destination-specific setup and finalization outside that method.

In this section

• Create a PDF document - write and finalize a multi-page PDF, set metadata, and handle incomplete output.
• Create an SVG document - draw one bounded SVG graphic and complete its XML by disposing the canvas.
• Create an XPS document - initialize COM and write a multi-page XPS file on supported Windows systems.

Related output paths

• To produce PNG, JPEG, WebP, or another raster image, render and encode bitmap pixels.
• To record Skia drawing commands for replay or Skia-specific serialization, use SKPictureRecorder and SKPicture. An SKPicture is not a standard document format.
• To render into pixels rather than a document stream, choose a SkiaSharp surface.