SVG Essentials

Chapter 12. Generating SVG

The previous chapters have described the major features of SVG. All the examples have been relatively modest and have been written in an ordinary text editor. For graphics of any great complexity, though, few people will write the SVG from scratch. Let’s face it: almost nobody does this by hand. Instead, graphic designers and programmers will use some sort of graphic tool that outputs SVG, or they will take existing raw data and convert it to SVG. If you’re dealing with a graphic program’s output that is already in SVG format, you can sit back and relax; all the heavy lifting has been done for you. If you ever take a look at the SVG that it generated, it may be hard to read. Some programs, for example, may not use groups (the <g> element) efficiently or they may not optimize paths. When you use these programs, you are trading off the ease of generating SVG for the absolute control you have when you write the entire file by hand.

If you’re dealing with data that’s already in XML format, you may just need to extract the pertinent data and plug it into an SVG framework. In such a case, you can use tools that implement Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). If the data is in XML but needs a fair amount of processing, you may need to write a program in Java or some other language to do the conversion. Luckily, you can take advantage of freely available XML parsers to do the busy work for you.

Finally, if you are dealing with data that ...