Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Librsvg

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Original author(s)
  
Raph Levien

Development status
  
Active

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Developer(s)
  
GNOME Project

Written in
  
C, Rust

Librsvg

Stable release
  
2.40.16 (9 June 2016; 9 months ago (2016-06-09)) [±]

librsvg is a free software SVG rendering library written as part of the GNOME project, intended to be lightweight and portable. The Linux command-line program rsvg uses the library to turn SVG files into raster images.

Contents

Backends

librsvg uses two other libraries to perform tasks from reading the file to rendering to the screen.

  • libxml is used to parse the XML code orientation of an SVG file into a form that can be accessed quickly by the library.
  • cairo is used to render the information obtained by libxml to a block of memory.

    • Adoption

    librsvg is developed for the GNOME desktop environment and as such is used by GNOME Files but is also intended to be used in other software applications. As a notable example, wikis hosted by Wikimedia use librsvg to render SVG images. It was once picked for these web applications because it was decidedly "fast but not very accurate", according to MediaWiki.

    Upon switching to the cairo vector rendering engine in 2005, librsvg became more accurate and more visually pleasing. Since 2012 an independent developer published Win32 console ports rsvg-convert.exe, as of March 2016 version 2.40.13. The rsvg-view manual page is also available online.

    References

    Librsvg Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA