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Lightweight C++ Library For SVG On Windows?
redblue writes "I would like to display vector graphics in my Windows C++ programs with minimal system requirements. Some of the possibilities are: 1. Enhanced Metafile Format format/EMF+, 2. Flash/SWG, 3. Silverlight/XAML, 4. SVG. The non-open proprietary nature of #2 & #3 make them unattractive. Since EMF+ is not amenable to easy editing, it leaves SVG as the only format worth pursuing. The trouble is that the major vendors have a lock on the market with their proprietary formats; leaving SVG high and dry with no easy native OS support. At least not on Windows. From what I could learn on the intertubes, Cairo is the best, if not only, reasonable system that may enable compiled SVG support. Unfortunately, AFAIK, it comes with a price tag of >2MB overhead and the C++ bindings are not straightforward." Read on for the rest of redblue's question; can you improve on his home-brewed solution?
"In a flash of the NIH syndrome, I rolled my own SVG processing engine and it has addressed my needs. You can see the result on http://www.arosmagic.com/Solitaire. A simple breakdown is: Framework+CRT(150K), SVG engine(100k), SVG art(350k). My SVG library is sufficient for me for now. But I can't help wonder:
1. Is there a better SVG library out there already available for easy inclusion?
2. If not, is there a need, i.e. market demand, for a lightweight (~200K) C++ SVG library that does not have the baggage of Silverlight or Flash?
If the answers are No/Yes, it may be worth it to make this library fully SVG compliant and release it as an open source alternative to the offerings from the entities that we shall not name but just collectively refer to as The Microbe. Please help out by letting me know if such a component is something that you would personally want to use in your current/future projects."
1. Is there a better SVG library out there already available for easy inclusion?
2. If not, is there a need, i.e. market demand, for a lightweight (~200K) C++ SVG library that does not have the baggage of Silverlight or Flash?
If the answers are No/Yes, it may be worth it to make this library fully SVG compliant and release it as an open source alternative to the offerings from the entities that we shall not name but just collectively refer to as The Microbe. Please help out by letting me know if such a component is something that you would personally want to use in your current/future projects."
That's just ideological drivel. The point is, SVG is a " standard " with a nice w3c.org - hosted spec and a nice diversified, academy-industry panel of contributors, but the fact remains, that in the 10 years since it became a standard, nobody really cares. Even browsers that support it officially only support subsets of it. The pragmatic reality is that it's a standard only in name, not in fact. If you want something with a clean, complete, consistent documentation describing a real, working, complete, multi-platform implementation, then what you call " proprietary" solutions are actually the way to go. Read the actual license terms for them and you'll see there's actually NOTHING that they prevent you to do, that you'll likely to have any interest in doing.
..about ripping the V8 and Skia engines from Chrome and making a standalone vector graphics system. Skia is light by design. V8 is fast and easy to embed by design. It's all C++ from the ground up. Implement the SVG interpreter in Javascript. Provide a JSON based alternative for the XML haters. Merge ongoing improvements from Chrome et al.
Just need a year of funding...
2 megabytes of overhead? It ain't 1988 anymore, 2MB barely even registers these days.
I get the whole Slashdot obsession with bloat, but there's a limit.
The pragmatic reality is that SVG is becoming standard very quickly. Have a look at wikipedia.org. (Have you heard of it?)
" proprietary" solutions are actually the way to go. Read the actual license terms for them and you'll see there's actually NOTHING that they prevent you to do, that you'll likely to have any interest in doing.
Yes, I'm sure that Adobe will have no problem with him using their library in his program that he gives out to all his friends and clients.
Pulling QtWebkit in is not exactly light weight. But Qt actually has another SVG rendered that implements the SVG tiny standard. Using QtSvg is still several megabytes of Qt libraries though, so except for the nice C++ interface, not the solution for the original question.
The Inkscape project is huge, but it almost sounds like you could rip livarot, Inkscape's current renderer, right from the code and use it. Inkscape itself doesn't even use Cairo because they consider it too immature (and, IMHO, it is, at this point).
OTOH, you could simply use librsvg to render the SVG graphics to PNG (or some other supported format) and display with the appropriate library calls.
Using librsvg this way always seemed like a bit of a kludge to me, but lots of projects use it for rendering.
So, to answer the OPs question as to whether or not there is a need for a lightweight C/C++ renderer -- I'd say yes.
My blog
The author of Antigrain is a perfectionist.
Just look here - http://www.antigrain.com/svg/index.html . And version 2.4 is under BSD license.
OTOH, you could simply use librsvg to render the SVG graphics to PNG (or some other supported format) and display with the appropriate library calls.
You bash Cairo for being "too immature" (wtf, really? It's one of the most advanced 2D vector libraries out there), and then recommend a rendering library that is written exclusively to render to Cairo. Well played sir.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
...Even browsers that support it officially only support subsets of it.
Exactly. The root cause is that "lightweight" and "SVG" are mutually exclusive. SVG is an incredibly complex standard, and implementing it to spec is going to take incredibly complex code.