Will Iverson's Blog

What ever happened to SVG?

So, I started playing around with a tool called Fujaba (a reasonable free Java/UML modeling tool). I needed something that would export UML class diagrams as vector graphics, and Fujaba seems to work fine (hint: increase the memory allocation from 128MB to something more reasonable, like 512MB).

Unfortunately, the only vector format that Fujaba supports is SVG. I'd like to have an EPS instead, as that's the preferred format for print. Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, there is no support for converting SVG to EPS. I can use Batik to convert to a raster format (such as TIFF), but obviously that's a lot less efficient.

I did a bunch of Googling. Lots of hits for announcements of SVG support from a variety of vendors, but a lot leaner when it comes to actual products and projects (commercial and open source). I found some stuff that indicated some folks were pushing SVG as a Flash replacement. The support I did find, however, was mostly in the SVG as EPS or static vector alternative. The final kicker - I could find plugins that supported SVG, but none of them worked as an inline object.

So... wither SVG? Are people still building and investing in it?

Comments

• It's beautiful on the inside
  SVG plus Javascript is one of the most powerful and elegant graphical programming environments ever created.

  Check out the svg-developers group on Yahoo if you want to stay abreast of what's really happening in the world of SVG. There is a fair amount of activity.

  We have done multiple SVG diagramming projects and there's an awful lot to like. The main problem is a lack of good user agents (Adobe's SVG plugin for IE is the best, and has not enough competition). Once Mozilla gets native support (Real Soon Now, for a while now), you'll start seeing a lot more SVG around.

  Cheers!
  Rob

  Posted by: robjellinghaus on February 04, 2004 at 01:36 PM

• It's beautiful on the inside
  So, how do you "publish" your SVG efforts? What software do you give / tell people to use? Develop SVG + JavaScript using text editors + XML editors, and then point people at the Adobe SVG Plugin?

  I've got the Adobe SVG Plugin, and the lack of competition has clearly hurt. ;)
  

  Posted by: wiverson on February 04, 2004 at 01:47 PM

• SVG to print (3 methods)
  1) Open with Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw and then save in a variety of formats. Use a free trial before buying, because I have seen problems with both on certain SVG documents (you can usually work around these problems, by tweaking the SVG, though)
  2) The Batik rasterizer does create PDF, I've successfully used the Ant task to do this, see:
  http://xml.apache.org/batik/svgrasterizer.html#task
  3) If you want to embed the SVG in a text document you can use FOP:
  http://xml.apache.org/fop/
  You can also embed SVG in DocBook documents, transform to XSL-FO and then to PDF.

  Good luck!

  Posted by: msgilligan on February 04, 2004 at 10:00 PM

• Open Office Supports SVG
  You an import SVG in to Open Offfice V1.1

  Posted by: cswilly on February 04, 2004 at 11:32 PM

• Open Office Supports SVG
  Are you sure about that? I found limited SVG export, but no import. And I also found some posts wondering when SVG import was coming...?

  There's no SVG import I could find in my OpenOffice 1.1.0...?

  Posted by: wiverson on February 05, 2004 at 12:13 AM

• GNOME and KDE support SVG
  Gnome and KDE support SVG icons, so you can make your desktop look like mine: http://kano.net/in/desktop.png .

  Posted by: keithkml on February 05, 2004 at 12:15 AM

• SVG to print (3 methods)
  Duh - yeah, PDF to EPS.

  I'll give that a try and see how it works...

  Thanks!
  

  Posted by: wiverson on February 05, 2004 at 12:17 AM

• It's beautiful on the inside
  Yes, that's what we do -- point people at the Adobe SVG plugin, which works very, very well with scripting.

  We've never gotten the IE script debugger to work with the SVG plugin scripts, though we hear that others have. But we make do with "println"-equivalent in SVG -- we just append text nodes to a "debug-output" group, so we see our debug output *in* the SVG window itself. Works quite well actually.

  Posted by: robjellinghaus on February 05, 2004 at 11:32 AM

• It's beautiful on the inside
  In fact we have actually licensed our SVG diagramming technology to an NFL football team, that is using it for diagramming football plays :-) That's how well it can work. We were basically able to create a Visio-like drag-and-drop lines-and-arrows drafting environment that is *far* faster and easier to work with than Visio or any other drawing application (we tried Visio in an earlier release), and *far* less work than writing the whole thing ourselves with System.Drawing or Swing or what have you. Really neat, neat stuff!

  Posted by: robjellinghaus on February 05, 2004 at 11:34 AM

• 
  SVG is happening
  [steltenpower had some great comments & links, but had trouble w/posting. Sent to me via email, I asked if I could post, and steltenpower said Ok... Cheers, -Will]

  SVG is happening: take a look at http://www.svgx.org

  and http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/04/foaf.html :-)

  Websites about SVG that are not updated in a long time, don't mean that SVG is dead. I know for example that some people with a very out of date site are very active on SVG.

  On average there's over a 1000 messages a month on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/

  jpeg's, PDFs or whatever format you get in front of you might have had SVG somewhere in the line of its creation.

  http://www.svgopen.org will be updated soon, with
  information about this year's edition of the conference, which will be in Tokyo

  " SVG - wave of the future, or dead-end format? " was probably meant to be a bit blunt and provoke some feedback. It worked.

  You are right that SVG is not very much on the forefront of communicating about what's going on with it. And there's a lot of outdated material around and the newer material is not always very easy to find. This is being worked on.

  Also on the side of programs working with SVG a lot of progress is made.

  Just look around a bit more with the hints i provided

  greetings,

  steltenpower

  Posted by: wiverson on February 05, 2004 at 03:00 PM

• SVG is more active than it has ever been
  SVG is very active and integrates well with Java.

  Here are a couple pointers:

  - The Batik project. A Java based SVG toolkit which allows you to do all kinds of things with SVG (generation, manipulation, conversion, viewing for example).
  http://xml.apache.org/batik.
  The Batik mailing list is very active which shows there are a large number of developer actively using SVG on J2SE.

  - The 'official' SVG Web site from W3C:
  http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG.
  You'll see there are product announcements, implementations and specification activity. You'll also find links to the latest product announcements.

  - There is a lot of activity in SVG for Mobiles. You can see announcements on the W3C web site page and have a look at the SVG Mobile specification:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile/

  - There is a JSR for SVG support on J2ME:
  http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=226

  - The SVG Developers Yahoo Group is very active.

  I agree the SVG community as a whole could improve its communication, and I think the SVG Open conference (the 3rd should happen this year) is a clear effort in that direction.

  One thing I find very interesting about SVG is that people who have experimented graphics with SVG and DOM manipulation (with Java or ECMAScript) usually speak very positively of their experience.
  

  Posted by: vhardy on February 24, 2004 at 06:40 AM

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