Do I need an SVG Viewer?

Do I need an SVG Viewer?

Today All Browsers Support SVG -Standalone SVG Viewers and Plug-ins Obsolete

svg logoSVG has come a long way since 1999. At that time, Adobe offered a special browser plug-in to view SVG files. Browsers like Chrome, internet Explorer amd Firefox all developed plug-ins to view SVG. Now, 20 years later, SVG is the standard vector graphics format for the Web. Independent SVG Viewers are obsolete and each browser has built-in support. Below is a list of each browser and when it added reasonable SVG support. It’s likely you are using a much newer release so you should be able to view SVG without problems.

  • > FireFox 4
  • > Opera 10
  • > Chrome 10
  • > Safari 5
  • > IE 8

SVG Resources

pdf2picture – Convert PDF to SVG

Inkscape SVG Editor

PDF to SVG Conversion API (DLL or Command-Line)

About SVG

SVG is a very robust vector format. SVG supports search, indexing, animation, dynamic data feeds and scripting. They contain precise information about the objects, text and attributes in each file.

Produce SVG from data or through coding. A more friendly approach is Inkscape, a robust drawing program using SVG as its native format. Convert other formats to SVG.

To ensure full-featured SVG, you need to know the difference between vector and raster SVG. SVG produced from vector formats like PDF, AI, EPS, WMF, EMF and DXF is ideal. These formats remains vector files, bringing along all the rich data. If SVG comes from bitmap formats like JPG, PNG, BMP or TIFF, raster SVG will result. These SVG files are simple wrappers around a flat, static bitmap image. No longer editable, these files are hardly SVG files. They don’t live up to the promise of the format as scalable. They will degrade when enlarged and are not editable at the object level. To get the most out of SVG files on your Web site, be sure to generate them from scratch, from data or from vector formats. Once a vector reduces to a bitmap, it’s impossible to go back to vector without time and heartache.