The story of two SVG libraries

SVG is a w3c standard for doing vector graphics and is being used more and more in the free software world. Multiple efforts are underway trying to add support or improving support for this format, with the Inkscape and Firefox projects being the most well known SVG backers. librsvg is the rendering library used in the GNOME desktop for SVG images, there have been some nice developments happening around librsvg lately so read on to get the details.

The teams working on librsvg and libsvg have decided to join forces around the CVS version of librsvg. Thanks to the work of the librsvg team, mostly Caleb Moore, librsvg now can support multiple rendering backends, with libart and Cairo backends implemented. The refactoring did cause some rendering regressions with the libart backend and the Cairo backend still needs some more work to reach parity with the libart one, as can be seen in this comparison table.

This means that people like Carl Worth, Dom Lachowicz, Caleb Moore and other contributors will focus their efforts on one SVG rendering library instead of spreading their efforts out over multiple projects, so most of these rendering regressions should be taken care of over the next few months, with a nice speed boost due to Cairo as an extra bonus. The team is of course always looking for more developers to help out though, so if you are interested in technologies such as SVG, Cairo and vector graphics be sure to stop by the #librsvg channel on Gimpnet for a chat.