Introduction

SVG is a XML based language to describe vector images. It's an official W3C Standard supported by many big companies like Adobe, Microsoft and others. Currently you will find SVG images only on a few webpages, but it's getting more popular every day. You may find it similar to macromedia's flash on a first glance. But in fact it is much more powerful. SVG can be much more interactive than Flash using fully scriptable DOM interfaces. If you already have a SVG Viewer you can checkout our (simple) random SVG Art creator here.

KSVG

KSVG is aiming to be a framework implementing the latest W3C SVG specifications. Current focus in on making a viewer capable of displaying the latest (1.1) specification compliant SVG files. We currently support quite much of the described SVG 1.0 / 1.1 features, including Animations / Filters / CSS, features which haven't been present in ksvg1, or only in a very rudimentary state. ksvg1 is the SVG implementation, which has been shipped with KDE from version 3.2 until 3.4. Since the end of 2003, we're rewriting ksvg from scratch which excellent results, compared to what ksvg could handle. So stay tuned for KDE4 :-)

The architecture of ksvg2 is very similar to that employed by Konqueror's HTML renderer (khtml). You can read more about it here.

SVG Icon Engine

Parts of ksvg1 have been integrated KDE, since February 2002. The SVG Icon Engine is a very lightweight KSVG 'rip-off', which supports most of the features of SVG which are used in icons. The Crystal SVG Icon set is (as the name implies) completely based on SVG. The SVG icon engine is used to convert these SVG's to PNG's. This Icon Engine was based on the libart library, which isn't used anymore by ksvg2/kcanvas, but 'AntiGrain' - which is the default rendering engine on Linux. This means in KDE4 we'll have an 'AntiGrain' based icon engine, which will be a rip-off of ksvg2, as an icon renderer does not need a DOM Implementation, like ksvg2 itself.

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