SVG links

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Definition

This is a links page about SVG. According to Wikipedia,

SVG images can be produced by the use of a vector graphics editor, such as Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDRAW, and rendered to common raster image formats such as PNG using the same software.

Software can be programmed to render SVG images by using a library such as librsvg or Batik. SVG images can also be rendered to any desired popular image format by using the free software command-line utility ImageMagick.

Web browsers which can display SVG images on web pages include Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE 9+), Opera, Safari and Google Chrome.

SVG on the desktop has also become common. The GNOME project has supported and extensively used SVG icons since 2000.

Other uses for SVG include embedding for use in word processing (e.g. with LibreOffice) and desktop publishing (e.g. Scribus), plotting graphs (e.g. gnuplot), and importing paths (e.g. for use in GIMP or Blender).

(retrieved 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST))

This page should help people finding tools, texts (introductions, tutorials, manuals, ...) and other resources. Read the SVG article for a short technical overview.

Updated: Checked all (well most) links on 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST) - Daniel K. Schneider

Tools

Indexes for SVG tools

Editors and drawing tools with SVG support

Text (programming) editors with SVG support
Free drawing programs with native SVG
  • Inkscape. Inkscape is a free (GPL) open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, node editing, svg-to-png export, grouping, and more. Available for Win, Linux, source. Recommended, but the tool requires learning !
Free online drawing programs with native SVG
  • SVG Edit is an online vector graphics editor that uses only JS, HTML5, CSS and SVG (i.e. no server-side functionality). You can use this online web 2.0 tool without installing anything on your computer, then "save as" in your navigator. Recommended: This tool is the best thing for learning SVG and for creating shapes that you later want to hand edit for animation and scripting
  • Imagebot by Flamingtext is a simple to use SVG editor. No source code editing but you can import SVG and save-as svg.
  • Pilat drawing tool (online)
Free drawing programs that can import/export SVG
  • Skencil, a free Linux/Unix vector drawing program can export/import SVG. (formely "Sketch", not tested). Imports/exports SVG.
  • OpenOffice and Libre office (a fork of OpenOffice) can import/export SVG.
  • DIA, a popular open source diagramming tool can import/export SVG (Win/Mac/Linux). There are also portable app (Windows) and zip versions (good for teachers who live in a restrictive environment...). Recommended.
Commercial drawing programs with native SVG
  • none ....
  • Sketsa SVG Graphics Editor by Kiyut, $89 Payware, Java 1.5+ based, demo and Java Webstart version available. Version 6.6 (jan 2012) tested with Ubuntu 10.4 and Win7. Claims to support SVG 1.1 full profile. You can edit code with a structure editor, e.g. for doing SMIL animations.
  • Jasc Web Draw was one of the earliest native SVG drawing programs. Corel then bought the company and killed the product. However, some copies float around ...
Commercial drawing programs with SVG import/export

These programs can usually both import/export SVG. However, you may loose information in both cases.

  • Adobe Illustrator can import/export SVG
  • SVG Kit for Adobe Creative Suite is a plug-in, which adds full-functional SVG and SVGZ file support to Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, PS Elements and InDesign).
  • Corel Draw can import/export SVG (not tested recently)
  • Microsoft Viso can import/export SVG (look at DIA above if you want a free solution)
  • SiteSpinner. (formerly WebDwarf). Drag-and-Drop Visual authoring and animation for HTML, DHTML, and SVG. ($50) - 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST)
  • Microsoft Visio can export to SVG

SVG support in web browsers

See Comparison of layout engines (SVG) (Wikipedia). There is also an interesting SVG test suite by test by Marek Raida.

Web browsers for PCs (Win/Mac/Unix/etc.)

Information below is probably not accurate, since new browsers implementations happen much more frequently. Anyhow if you are interested in playing with the (somewhat) latest technology, we suggest installing at least the following: Chrome, Firefox, Opera on all OSs (good SVG/HTML5 support), plus Internet Explorer on Win and Safari on Mac.

The following browsers support SVG 1.1 (as of march 2012) Tiny, Basic and Full.

  • Opera used to be the only browser with good native SVG support. It now remains as good as Chrome and Firefox. (Win / Mac / Linux / Cell phones / Smart phones / Tablets)
  • Chrome 10 (and later) can do most SVG. (Win / Mac / Linux / Smart phones / Tablets)
  • IE 9 can do static SVG and DOM animation/interactivity (including HTML5 SVG) (2011). Some features seem to be missing and it cannot do any SVG/SMIL. (Windows only)
  • Firefox since version 1.5 included by default a native SVG and support for SVG-DOM, but did not implement SMIL animation tags. This was fixed in Firefox 4 (March 2011). Version 11 is at the same level as Chrome and Opera (Winter 2012).
  • Safari uses the same Webkit engine as Chrome, but usually lacks behind. Should implement most of SVG. (Mac / Win)
Web browsers for portable devices

The situation is not very clear here, since many people may have an older device that doesn't necessarily update...

  • Webkit (Safari mobile, some palm, symbian S60, etc.): SVG 1.1. Chrome also should work on very recent Androids (version 4?)
  • Presto engines: Opera mobile supports SVG 1.1 Tiny and most of Basic and Full. Opera mobile 2.1 supports SVG 1.2 Tiny.
  • Firefox for mobile (Fennec). Should run in Android (not tested)
  • Android HoneyComb supports SVG. But you must install a recent version and maybe update Android too...

Other viewing software

Plugins for web browsers

Since 2010, SVG plugins are no longer needed !. Information below is kept for historical reasons.

  • The Adobe SVG Viewer, worked with with IE and Firefox. Adobe discontinued support after they finally managed to acquire Macromedia (and Flash). The quality of this plugin was impressive. It implemented all of SVG 1.0. After Adobe dropped the project, getting it to work with IE 7 and Firefox 3 (or 4?) was quite a nightmare.....
Special purpose web browsers
  • The X-smiles XML-browser (a research browser made to explore various new web formats) supported SVG (uses CSIRO SVG viewer), also SMIL, XForms, X3D, etc.
  • Adobe AIR (not tested though)
Viewers
  • Batik is mainly a toolkit for server-side applications, but it also includes a good stand-alone SVG browser called Squiggle that fully implements static SVG and scripting (but you may as well use Firefox or Opera for this). We use this toolkit for this wiki in order to render SVG graphics as PNG, but you also may use it as a helper application for your web browser.

SVG emulators

  • SVGWeb. A google project that translates SVG to Flash. SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.

Convertors

  • Most vector graphic software can import/export in several formats (see above). E.g. to import SVG in Flash one can open the SVG in Illustrator and then select all/copy/paste to CS3/4/5
  • SVG Import Filter for OpenOffice 2 (tested with OO 3.1 / Ubuntu: Import worked, but I did not test much - Daniel K. Schneider 13:51, 12 May 2010 (UTC)). An imported image then can be exported in other formats, e.g. WMF.
  • SVG to PNG converter (old Firefox 3 extension)
  • Vector Magic. Popular online tool for converting Bitmap Images To Clean Vector Art (not tested - Daniel K. Schneider 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST)).
  • SVG Maker Commercial multi-format to SVG translator (not tested - Daniel K. Schneider 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST) !)

Validation and cleanup tools

Online editors

  • SVG-edit, an online editor implemented in JavaScript. Strongly recommended


Toolkits for programmers

(needs updating - Daniel K. Schneider 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST) !)

  • Batik SVG Toolkit. It is mostly used for server-side applications. E.g. this Wiki uses Batik to translate SVG into PNG. There is also a stand-alone batik viewer.
  • phpHtmLLib. A set of PHP classes and library functions to help facilitate building, debugging, and rendering of XML, HTML, XHTML, WAP/WML Documents, and SVG, and complex widgets. Stable and popular - Version 3.02 (March 2008). Supports basic SVG functionality an image and a graph classe. E.g. see this SVG Graph
  • SVG-TT-Graph , a popular Perl module for line graphs, bars and pies [1/2004, not tested]
  • More PHP kits can be found on the web, see also our php example directory (some code is disabled for security reasons).
  • Pergola JavaScript SVG Library

Standards

  • The official SVG specification at W3C. (Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition), W3C Recommendation 16 August 2011)
  • Spécification SVG 1.0 (français)
  • Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic W3C Recommendation 14 January 2003, edited in place 15 June 2009 (SVG on the road !)
  • W3C Validator. This popular online validation tool can validate SVG up to a certain extent. It will mostly just check syntax, i.e. it cannot detect bad attribute values.
  • SMIL animation SVG has incorporated SMIL-type animations (a superset). This means that SMIL tutorials will also be useful to you.
  • ECMAScript Language Binding for SVG (just SVG specific stuff, SVGElement has all the properties and methods of dom::Element !)
  • sXBL (W3C Working Draft 15 August 2005). SVG's XML Binding Language (sXBL) is proposed as a mechanism for defining the presentation and interactive behavior of elements described in a namespace other than SVG's. (This will allow definition of high-level tagsets). [9/2004]

Manuals and Textbooks

Free Online Textbooks

  • SVG Essentials The free wiki version of O'Reilly's SVG Essentials book by J. David Eisenberg (2002)
  • Javascript DOM and SVG database (from Pilat). This a searchable and browsable database of JavaScript tricks including SVG DOM . Also includes examples.
  • Learn SVG from the authors of the same print book.
    • The tutorials include an interface lists attributes for tags and then provides both examples and code. Recommended.
    • Start from Basics.
    • For DOM Scripting, see Scripting tutorial
    • You also can downlaod chapters of the original book. However, some examples probably will need fixing.

Online references

(easier than looking at standards)

  • SVG reference at W3Schools. As of March 2012, probably too concise to be useful to beginners.

Books

  • HTML5 Graphics with SVG & CSS3, Drawing with Markup. By Kurt Cagle. Publisher: O'Reilly Media. Released: May 2012 (est.)
    • Kurt Cagle is an SVG expert. The book should be good (when it comes out ...)
  • SVG Essentials. By J. Eisenberg. Publisher: O'Reilly Media. Released: February 2002. Pages: 358
    • This book is still a good buy. It remains my favorite SVG book. However, SVG is now big in HTML5. Therefore O'Reilly should publish a new version that includes HTML5 specifics and more DOM scripting. Also, Eisenberg, like many other SVG authors back then didn't test SVG within a native browser and missed the fact that namespaces must be declared. Add the following line within the first SVG tag of examples that break with a "prefix not bound to a namespace" message:
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"

Example sites

Once you have some basic understanding of SVG after reading a tutorial or two, you probably will learn best by example.

General

  • SVG elves are sharing articles, code snippets, and events
  • LearnSVG. Good sample extracts from the Learn SVG: The Web Graphics Standard" by Jon Frost, Stefan Goessner and Michel Hirtzler book. Revisited by Robert DiBlasi and Tobias Reif. (Some examples max lack namespace definitions and will not run unless you fix these - but that may have been fixed by now - 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST)).
  • Marek Raida's SVG blog. Includes some good recent examples and also some kind of benchmarking suites. (last checked Mars 2011).
  • SVG - Learning By Coding Site with many very nice examples including advanced topics (in German), easy browsing and looking at code.
  • Pilat Several kinds of examples in french (e.g. SVG/Javascript, complex applications. There is an English version. This website has quite a lot of information.
HTML 5 demos that may include SVG

SVG Clipart

Code fragments

Tutorials

General overviews

Basic Tutorials

Updated
Older materials

Code may be broken, but these texts may still be useful

SVG with JavaScript and DOM

SMIL Animation

(as of fall 2011 supported in all modern browsers)

  • Digging Animation, by Antoine Quint, XML.com, 2002 (SMIL animation, most examples seem to be broken as of 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST)).

Server-side SVG

SVG and XSLT

Various articles (not classified)

General SVG resource pages

  • User Documentation at Inkscape. Mostly documentation for Inkscape, but also includes some links to general SVG tutorials, e.g. the SVG Animation in its own wiki.
  • SVG - Learning By Coding Site with many very nice examples including advanced topics (in German), easy browsing and looking at code. Many examples need a state-of-the-art browser (e.g. Chrome 10) or else the old Adobe plugin. Bester Site auf Deutsch.
  • Pilat Informative Educative [francais]. SVG - PHP - MySQL - Javascript. Le meilleur site français. Also includes an English variant with (less?) contents.
  • svg.pagina.nl Good dashboard page page by Ruud Steltenpool. Many good links.
  • SVG Page at DMOZ (for nostalgic people, when links pages were made by humans)
  • carto:paperssvg (A.M. Winter & A. Neumann). VERY good SVG resources, examples, etc. Swiss made :) .... but less active since 2007 :(
  • W3C Scalable Verctor Graphics (SVG). This is the W3C SVG overview page (includes News and Pointers)
  • Sacré SVG, a XML.com column (not updated since 2005).
  • SVG Open conference series. Usually, papers are open content.
  • dev.opera includes several good svg articles (including some good live examples, but you will have to search ...)
  • SVG magazine. The quarterly publication covering technique, coding, art, reviews and more. So far, there are 2 issues - 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST).
  • IBM Developer Works (search for "SVG" gives 709 results - 18:45, 28 March 2012 (CEST)).

Communities

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