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Introduction to Transformations

Transformations are distortions to your artwork that are calculated before a viewer renders your SVG document. Thus, a square that is rotated 45° will appear to someone viewing your document as a diamond; unless they examine your code, they will be unaware of the fact that a transformation was applied.

Transformations are applied as attributes to other elements, such as shapes, groups, or instances. Most often you will see a transformation applied to groups surrounding objects or symbol instances to maximize the usefulness of a transform. By modifying a symbol instance instead of the original, your original artwork will retain its intended properties; instances of that artwork can be modified by a transformation ...