Listening to: The Number of the Beast - Iron Maiden

Well I spent the arvo bingeing on SVG renders. I have been pottering around with ImageMagick for a few months - but it doesn’t play nice (out of the box) with SVG text - and text is a BIG DEAL for what I am doing.

While trying to find if I could use the SVG renderer in Webkit I happened upon librsvg and ksvg2. I used darwinports to install rsvg on my mac and then clue’d up and simply flashed up my ubuntu VirtualBox (hattip to Nahum for pointing me at the sweet little Parallels replacement). Note for future reference - if you’ve got a virtual Linux machine apt-get will save you hours and, given how hot my poor little Mac got, a few watts.

An informal shoot out points in the direction of librsvg (rsvg being the command line app) rather than ksvg (with it’s associated ksvgtopng command line app). It seems that I can recompile ImageMagick to use librsvg (and thus get access to it via RMagick)… but I might just run with calls to the commandline to get something out the door. This result surprised me a little as Safari renders SVG beautifully and that uses ksvg2.

PS. If this post seems like a bit of SEO baiting exercise… I hope it works and that I am able to save others the hours of research :-).

PPS. In my wanderings I found this research project at Sun - I’m not too sure what it is, but someone is going nuts with SVG over there.

PPPS. I know that if you’re an Ubuntu user you’ve probably got a good case of “rolls eyes” going on right about now… I can live with that

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under SVG, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.