SVG export with editable text

Hi, thanks for this idea! We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post:

I am still paying for lucid while it still is near to useless as long as this bug exists.

Is there any update about the status of this issue?

Hey ​@Arne B, thank you for chiming in! Just to clarify, this is not a bug but more of a feature limitation. Your comments here are helpful to our product teams as they continue to research new product features and enhancements!

​@Zuzia S 

Adding another concrete use case for this, since it's not just about post-export editing in Inkscape/Illustrator.

We're a 100,000+ employee enterprise and a large Lucid customer. We use Lucidchart diagrams as embedded graphics in multilingual technical documentation (process flow diagrams in regulated SOP documents, Confluence-based). We're building a workflow to automatically translate diagram text via machine translation — which requires the exported SVG to contain real, extractable text content.

Right now, Lucidchart's SVG export converts every character to a <path> outline referenced via <use> — there's no actual text string anywhere in the file, just vector geometry. That makes the file completely opaque to any kind of automated text processing, not just manual editing.

For reference: exporting the exact same diagram via Microsoft Visio produces an SVG with proper <text>/<tspan> elements and real label strings. So this isn't a hard limitation of the SVG format — other tools in the same diagramming space already do this. It would be a significant improvement if Lucidchart's own SVG export offered the same (ideally as an explicit export option, e.g. "embed text as text" vs. "outline text for font independence," so both use cases — portability and editability/automation — are covered).

Four years is a long time for something that's apparently already solved elsewhere in the industry, and it's a real blocker for enterprise documentation workflows at our scale. Would appreciate an update on whether this is being considered.