IBM’s alphaWorks Tuesday posted SVGView, its first viewer available for scalable vector graphics (SVG), for download from the alphaWorks Web site.
This technology provides developers with a way to view vector graphics images which use the proposed open SVG standard format. Also Tuesday, in a related announcement, the Web Developer’s Virtual Library announced the publication of an SVG tutorial entitled “Doing It With SVG.”
SVG is an XML grammar which is used to create two-dimensional vector graphics, and was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SVG is both cross-platform and vendor-neutral. IBM is one of the first in the industry to offer vendor-neutral software for previewing SVG images, helping Web professionals to create vector graphics while avoiding proprietary issues or being locked into any single company’s software. The WDVL’s tutorial on SVG is also one of the first to be published for the Web developer community.
SVG supports three types of graphic objects, including vector graphic shapes (in other words, paths consisting of straight lines and curves), images and text. These graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed, and composited into objects which have been previously rendered. Features of SVG images include:
- Nested
- Transformations
- Clipping paths
- Alpha masks
- Filter effects
- Template objects
- Extensibility
SVGView is a small viewer which enables users to view SVG “documents.” The tool is implemented in Java for enhanced portability, and this lets it take advantage of the advanced features that are available in the Java 2D graphics engine. At present, SVGView supports a subset of the SVG specification and is capable of rendering local SVG files.
The WDVL’s SVG tutorial covers SVG graphic elements, provides working examples, and reviews the SVG viewers that are currently available, including IBM’s SVGView. For additional information, or to read the SVG tutorial, visit the WDVL Web site.
