There is some bug in our PDF pipeline where clipped elements in SVG images are incorrectly handled. It seems to include the clipped portions in the calculations of the image size, not just the dimensions after clipping. This has the effect that images are incorrectly scaled and positioned if there are large elements that are clipped to something much smaller. I've reported the issue upstream here: https://github.com/rst2pdf/rst2pdf/issues/1173 For now, we just have to avoid large clipped elements. Perhaps avoid clipping entirely?