W3C Graphics SVG

W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - History

SVG History

This page contains all the dated news items over the history of SVG. Links on the this page are historical, and might age over time.

2001-Nov-21

XML.com has an article SVG: Where Are We Now? by Antoine Quint, surveying the state of the SVG software scene and giving advice on viewers, editors, svg-exporting graphics packages, and other tools. Antoine concludes I think the state of SVG's support in the industry is astonishing since its still in its early stages. It is also interesting to take into account the speed at which progress has been and is still being made. At this pace, this article will need a complete overhaul in six months.

WebReference.com has an eight-part article Scalable Vector Graphics: The Art is in the Code by Eddie Traversa. This article was the headline story for Internet.com's daily mailing.

2001-Nov-20

Batik 1.1rc4was released in source and binary form today. Changes include an improved rasterizer, better link handling, performance tuning and an extended regression test suite. Written in Java 2, it runs on any Java-2 platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS X, etc)

2001-Nov-16

Bug 80142, get new svg code into cvs is the fourth most popular bug for Mozilla. (Its already in CVS, but its not in the trunk so does not build by default). If you have a Bugzilla registration you can add your vote, too. Also see the Mozilla in SVG Project and download an SVG-enabled build (MacOS, Windows, Linux)

2001-Nov-15

Meister have available three SVG-related products for CAD conversion

  • SVG コンバータ for DXF (DXF to SVG converter)
  • SVG コンバータ for HPGL (HPGL to SVG converter)
  • SVG コンバータ for Visio (Visio 2002 to SVG converter)

The winner of 2001 XML WWWページコンテスト 応募作品説明資料 (2001 WWW XML Page Contest) was Local Community Information Service (in Japanese) by Suppon Project. This design used a central database of map information in G-XML format, and conversion to SVG for client display. The prize was awarded at the recent XML 2001 Japan conference, and a detailed report on the contest and the reviews will be published in the next issue of XML Press magazine.

2001-Nov-07

Adobe announced the final release Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0 for Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP and MacOS 8.x/9.x/10.1. It is available in 15 languages. Compared to version 2.0 more elements, attributes, CSS properties and DOM methods from the SVG 1.0 specification are supported. There is also an internal script engine.

2001-Nov-05

Translations of the SVG 1.0 specification are now in progress into German and into Japanese. See the SVG translations page for details.

The SVG Factory is a way to export SVG via the Windows clipboard. it works best with applications that put vector data such as WMF or EMF onto the clipboard. There is documentation online. The source of the C++ libraries can also be licensed to provide SVG export capability for Windows programs.

2001-Nov-01

Andreas Neumann announced the SVG.Open Developers Conference to be held July 15-17 2002 in Zurich, Switzerland. The conference language will be English. There will be exhibition opportunities for SVG-related software (including freeware and shareware). Naturally the conference logo is in SVG. (Informations également disponible en Français)

2001-Oct-30

The W3C SVG WG announced the first public release of the SVG 1.1 specification, and also of two SVG 1.1 profiles (SVG Tiny and SVG Basic) collectively known as Mobile SVG. This is an initial draft, we wanted to get developer feedback as early as possible. Comments on the modularization strategy, the additional features of SVG 1.1, the features included and omitted in SVG Tiny and SVG Basic are particularly welcomed.

The Third Release of the SVG 1.0 Test Suite, together with an updated Implementation Report, was also released.

2001-Oct-29

Amaya 5.2 is released. SVG-specific changes include support for the embed element for external SVG images, and handling of nested link anchors.Binaries for various platforms are available, plus source. English and French spell-check dictionaries are included.

2001-Oct-26

The new version 0.45 of X-Smiles, the SVG/SMIL/XForms/XSL/etc multi namespace browser was released. New features include XML Event support, improved SMIL 2 basic support, XForms enhancements. and performance and bugfixes.

2001-Oct-22

Vincent Hardy announced availability of Batik SVG Toolkit 1.1rc3. The full source code is also available.

2001-Oct-12

DBx Geomatics announced the release of SVGMapMaker, an SVG export facility for the MapInfo Professional GIS program. Online documentation and export samples are available.

2001-Oct-10

Michael Bierman announced the release of Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0 release candidate 1.

2001-Oct-08

The International Herald Tribune (print edition) carries the Jeffery Selingo article SVG: Web Images True to Form Even on the Tiniest Screen.

2001-Oct-05

Ronan Oger announced SVG.pl V 0.1, a Perl language module for server-side SVG generation of web content. Its available in CPAN. Working samples are also available.

2001-Oct-04

The New York Times has an article about SVG, Online Images That Stay True to Form on Any Screen by Jeffery Selingo.

2001-Sep-27

Adobe released SVG Viewer 3.0 beta 3. Bugs should be reported as the beta period is expected to be short.

PC Plus has a review of Adobe Golive 5.0,which mentions the support for SVG in this version.

Plazmic announces the availability of Plazmic Media Engine and Plazmic Workshop Start. The Media Engine displays graphics on mobile devices such as cellphones, and Workshop Start is an authoring tool that imports SVG.

Version 0.24 of Sodipodi, a native-language SVG editor for Linux, has been released.

2001-Sep-25

C|net has a multi-page article Real-world SVG by Jackson West which includes coverage of styling, scripting, and a 'beyond the basics' section.

2001-Sep-24

Adobe issued a press release about Illustrator 10. This will have SVG import, improved and faster SVG export, support for symbols, support for data driven graphics with templates, and editable SVG effects. Macworld had a review.

MacCentral reported that Adobe announced InDesign 2.0 which introduces built-in, extensible support for exporting SVG as well as importing and exporting XML files.

Linux.com had an interview with Lauris Kaplinski, author of the native SVG editor Sodipodi.

2001-Sep-21

JASC announced public availability of WebDraw preview release 5. This adds an animation timeline for editing timed animations, has an improved DOM viewer, a preview pane, and improved SVG support in terms of elements and attributes recognised. Generated SVG is now updated to the SVG 1.0 Recommendation.

2001-Sep-18

Andrew Watt announced availability of his book Designing SVG Web Graphics, published by New Riders.

The October issue of WebTechniques magazine has review of JASC WebDraw (version PR4b) by Lynne Cooney

Another book on SVG (the first in German): Das Einsteigerseminar SVG - Webgrafiken mit XML by Helma Sponer, published by vmi-Buch AG.

2001-Sep-13

Adobe release SVG Viewer 3.0 beta 2. They are looking for feedback.

2001-Sep-12

XML.com has an article Picture Perfect by Edd Dumbill, which states Along with W3C XML Schema, SVG is one of the most important technologies to emerge from the W3C this year.

2001-Sep-10

Batik 1.1 release candidate 2 is available from Apache.

Transfert.net has an article Flash est mort, vive le SVG ! by Julien Chambaud.

2001-Sep-06

Internet Watch has an article W3C、2次元ベクターグラフィックス記述言語「SVG 1.0」を勧告 by hiro@nakajima-gumi.net (in Japanese).

Alex Fritze releases build 0.6 of Mozilla SVG. Binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are available, and you can also get the source out of CVS (now in a Mozilla branch) and compile it yourself on other platforms.

A busy thread about SVG starts on slashdot.

2001-Sep-05

SVG 1.0 was released as a W3C Recommendation. Here is the list of changes since the Proposed Recommendation of 19 July 2001. There was a press release (also available in French and Japanese) and testimonials by W3C Members.

SMIL Animation was also issued as a W3C Recommendation. SVG uses SMIL Animation for declarative, time-based animation.

News articles about the new Recommendations:

2001-Aug-31

Michael Bierman announced version Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0beta1. New features include 'switch', (plus 'requiredFeatures' and 'systemLanguage), linking to SVG images, color profiles, markers, and views. DOM and CSS support is also improved. There are bug report and feedback forms. In addition to existing platforms, MacOS X and Windows XP are supported.

Version 0.4 of XSmiles was released. New features include support for SMIL 2.0 Basic and for the latest draft of XForms. As before, there is SVG and XSL-FO and XSL-T support as well.

2001-Aug-28

An XMLhack article by Edd Dumbill notes that FOP wraps Batik - the open-source FOP implementation of XSL Formatting Objects, which previously had its own SVG renderer, now includes the similarly open-source Batik SVG Toolkit. A much wider portion of the SVG specification can thus be used, mixed in with Formatting Objects, to generate high quality PDF documents from XML source.

2001-Aug-24

The German Linux User magazine has an article Vektorzeichenprogramme Punkt, Gerade, Kurve by Frank Wieduwilt comparing six illustration programs - Xfig, Figurine, Impress, Sodipodi, Kontour and Sketch - the latter three of which can both import and export SVG. (in German).

2001-Aug-16

Virtual Mechanics releases IMS Web Engine v.197, a drag and drop editor which can export either animated SVG and dynamic HTML. See also SVG Magic which showcases this technology

2001-Aug-10

The French magazine 01 Informatique has an article SMIL 2.0 pose en professionnel de l'animation Web by Francisco Villacampa. SMIL 2.0 and SVG are discussed. (in French)

2001-Aug-07

James Turner announced availability of a Mac (OS 9) build of Mozilla SVG.

2001-Aug-03

The first draft of the SVG Mobile Requirements document was released. It lists the design principles and requirements for the creation of a mobile profile of the SVG specification to be developed by the W3C SVG2 working group.

The first draft of the SVG 1.1/2.0 Requirements document was also released. It lists the design principles and requirements for future versions of the SVG language, in particular versions 1.1 and 2.0, to be developed by the W3C SVG working group. Refer to SVG 1.0 for details on the current specification.

Feedback on these requirements documents should be sent to the email list www-svg2-comments@w3.org. This is a public list that is archived.

2001-Jul-19

The SVG 1.0 Proposed Recommendation is published. Here is the list of changes from the Candidate Recommendation. As you can see, SVG is widely implemented and very stable. The W3C is asking it's members to provide feedback within four weeks, at which time the Director will decide whether to make SVG a formal Recommendation.

2001-Jul-17

Version 2.67 of KVec, a raster to vector converter adds SVG output support. Its a command-line tool and runs on WIN9X, WIN NT, WIN 2000, OS/2, Linux, HP-Unix, Macintosh, BeOS. Information also available in German

2001-Jul-16

Alex Fritze has made available Mozilla SVG version 0.4. This release includes a number of significant enhancements, in particular to paths, transformations and the viewport. As with previous releases, SVG can be mixed with other XML namespaces such as XHTML, XUL, XBL in the same XML file; animation via the DOM and styling via CSS is supported.

The Belgian Highways ministry is using SVG on their official website, and in their annual report (in French) Examples of SVG-enabled pages are major road projects of the Walloon region, and an interactive map showing the conversion of abandoned railways to cycle and jogging paths.

2001-Jul-13

Wrox press has an article A Quick Introduction to SVG by Phil Jackson - XML Team.

2001-Jul-11

XML.com has a two-part article Creating Scalable Vector Graphics with Perl by Kip Hampton which notes: when you compare this method of scripted image creation to those provided by other modules (that often, themselves, depend on cranky and platform-specific libraries) the true power of combining Perl and SVG becomes obvious. A worked example of creating a pie-chart visualisation of a Web server log is also given. The article concludes: SVG is astonishingly cool. The examples above barely scratch the surface of SVG's flexibility and communicative power.

Amaya 5.1 includes some SVG-related bugfixes.

2001-Jul-10

Business 2.0 magazine has an article Graphics for Gadgets by David Orenstein which explaines the business case for vector graphics on all devices, including desktops and mobie, handheld devices .

2001-Jul-06

WebReview.com has an article Scalable Vector Graphics: The What and the How by Jason Cranford Teague which concludes As with all technologies there will be an inevitable breaking-in period as SVG gains wider acceptance and Web designers learn not only how to use it, but also the best ways to use it.

2001-Jul-05

A new stable version 0.6.12 of Sketch, the SVG-exporting drawing program for Linux and other 'nices, writen in Python. .

2001-Jul-04

Amaya 5.0 was released. Binaries (Solaris 8, Linux, Windows NT/2000 /95/98) and source are available. Amaya is a WYSIWYG Editor/Browser testbed from W3C. Version 5.0 allows SVG files to be referenced from the the XHTML 'img' and 'object' elements and the SVG 'image' element, as well as included inline which previous versions could already do. Another neat feature is that double-clicking on a 'use' element scrolls the structure view (if it's open) and shows the referred symbol element at the top of the window. This version also has improved PNG image support.

2001-Jul-02

Following up on his earlier announcement, Rick Graham posted a page with scanned demos and platform specs to show what devices they have SVG running on. A variety of SVG files, which can be downloaded, are displayed on mobile devices running PalmOS (Palm IIIc, Handspring Visor Prism), Pocket PC (Compaq iPAQ H3650 and H3150), Linux (Agenda VR3), and even on the Blackberry Rim - yes, SVG on a pager!

2001-Jun-20

Rick Graham announced that The research team at BitFlashhas a version of SVG that we have created for research purposes called SdVG (Small Device Vector Graphics). The system runs on PalmOS, Blackberry Rim, and Agenda VR3 and is written in C++. A DOM is built and SMIL Animation is supported (even on the Rim!).

Note - this research work should be distinguished from the existing product, Bitflash Mobility Server which is a server side system for mobile solutions, which also uses SVG.

2001-Jun-18

A series of five SVG articles in the magazine XML Press Vol. 3 技術評論社, 2001年6月18日発売 by 石棉 豪介 (Gosuke ISHIWATA) <ishiwata@sec.co.jp> entitled 特集2 SVGによるWebアプリケーション開発  (Feature Article 2: Web Application Development with SVG) (in Japanese):

  • 第1章 SVGの最新動向を確認する 急速に発展する,XMLベースの次世代グラフィックスフォーマット
  • 第2章 SVGによるWeb開発のための基礎知識 これだけは知っておきたいサーバサイトSVGのポイント
  • 第3章 はじめてのSVG Webアプリケーション Hello Worldから為替レートグラフの生成まで
  • 第4章 SVGによる地図/GISアプリケーション開発 地図を利用した経路検索Webシステムの開発
  • 第5章 SVGのメリット/デメリット

Javasoft.com has an article PLAZMIC SEIZES THE DAY: End-to-End Solution for Rich Wireless Content by Kammie Kayl. It describes the Plasmic Workshop, a content authoring system for the Japanese NTT DoCoMo mobile phones, which can display Java applets up to 10k. The authoring system uses SVG as the input, and transcodes it for the phones.

2001-Jun-14

A thread on the KDE developer lists discussed the correct way to add SVG support to the Konqueror web browser. SVG is already supported by the KIllustrator drawing packge, part of the KOffice Suite.

Michael Bierman announced that version 2.0 of the Adobe SVG implementation was available to download in a further 11 languages, making 15 languages in all.

2001-Jun-08

The French site PowerGED.com propose aux généalogistes amateurs de visualiser leurs arbres généalogiques à travers la norme SVG et de les imprimer s'ils le souhaitent sur des banderoles de papier grand format (allows members to visualize genealogical trees in SVG and to print them out out on large size paper).

2001-Jun-01

in-integrierte informationssysteme GmbH announced the release of Sphinx SVG 1.1, a dynamic graphical editor which exports SVG including SMIL Animation. A save- and print-disabled evaluation version is available for download. This version does allow the export of SVG so that aspect can be evaluated, but drawings cannot be saved for further editing. Details also available in German. The user interface can be installed in either English or German.

An article on XMLhack, SVG renderer for UML diagrams by Edd Dumbill, describes BOX which takes as input an XML representation of UML (XMI) and exports SVG. The code is rough, but the source is available under GPL so feel free to help improve it ;-)

2001-May-29

The Ministère de l'Aménagement du Territoire et de l'Environnement (a part of the French Government) is using SVG on their official website to create an interactive map of zones of biological interest in the Loire-Brittany basin. Documentation is available (in French)

2001-May-21

Batik has exited beta - Batik SVG Toolkit 1.0 is now available. In addition to the SVG Browser, SVG Renderer, and SVG Generator that were in the beta releases, there are two format convertors (WMF to SVG and True Type Font to SVG Font). Batik now supports nearly all of static SVG, plus linking.

2001-May-09

Edd Dumbill of XML.com Reports from WWW10 - the Tenth International World Wide Web conference, held this year in Hong Kong. He reports on various parts of the W3C track including Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web and new generation XML, Thierry Michel on SMIL and Chris Lilley on SVG. The issue of legacy HTML browser vendor uptake of faster rendering, more predictable XHTML is also addressed.

2001-May-02

Gardos Software announced a new release of an ActiveX DLL that converts DXF files to SVG files. There are further details of the functionality available.

2001-Apr-23

The April issue of Web Techniques Magazine includes an article on SVG, Integrated Design by Molly E. Holzschlag and a review of some SVG tools, by Clayton Crooks, covering the Batik SVG Toolkit and Jasc WebDraw.

2001-Apr-18

Adobe announced availability of the final version 2.0 of their SVG Viewer for Netscape plugin-compatible browsers and Active-X environments on Windows32 and MacOS platforms. It is available in English and in Japanese, with other languages being rolled out later. The old version 1.0 viewer is no longer supported. There is a list of supported features.

Adobe also confirmed that this implementation will be widely distributed on CD with many Adobe products (Acrobat®, Acrobat Reader®, PhotoShop®, Illustrator®, GoLive® etc) and with Real Player®.

2001-Apr-15

Software Mechanics announced an evaluation preview of SVGmaker for W95/98/ME. This is a printer driver that exports SVG from any Windows program that can print. The demo versionsfor NT/Windows2000 and W95/98/ME remain available.

2001-Apr-12

At Seybold, Quark director of product management Jürgen Kurz confirmed XML and SVG support in Quark Xpress 5®

2001-Apr-11

Version 0.32 of XSmiles was released. Enhancements include SVG/XForms integration , EcmaScript mouse events in SVG viewer , SMIL switch support, and support for SVG images in SMIL presentations.

There will be a session about SVG at the 今年もやるぜ!(Mozilla dot Party in Japan 2.0). Jun Fujisawa from Canon is the organizer of the SVG session, which will be held on Sunday, 22 April 2001, 14:30 - 15:30 JST at 17th floor (West), Shibuya Mark City, Tokyo. This will include SVG demos, a discussion of the current status of the SVG in Mozilla project, and an introduction to the work of the W3C in SVG. See also the Japanese version of the Mozilla SVG page

2001-Mar-29

Square One is nearly finished beta testing their PostScript to SVG engine, used in PS2Web and PS2Vector products.

2001-Mar-24

CAD Standard Pro, a computer aided design package now has SVG export from version 3.5.1 of the product. A list of features is available. CCAD Standard Pro runs on Windows32 platforms, with a Linux version in development.

2001-Mar-21

XML.com has An Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics by J. David Eisenberg

SICAD, makers of SICAD Internet Suite announced in Hannover at CeBIT 2001 that ...Neben den web-üblichen Rasterformaten JPEG, GIF und PNG unterstützt die neue SICAD Internet Suite darüber hinaus auch den aufkommenden Shooting-Star unter den Vektorformaten, das XML basierte SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). ... (...Besides the commonly used web raster formats JPEG, GIF, and PNG the new SICAD Internet Suite supports the rising shooting-star of the vector formats, the XML based SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)...).

2001-Mar-15

Savage Software today announced a full release of its Savage SVG Toolkit run-time libraries. The Savage SVG Toolkit provides a packaged solution for software publishers seeking to build SVG support into their products and is implemented in ANSI C++. They claim to be a 100% complete implementation of the SVG Document Object Model, as defined by the most recent W3C Scalable Vector Graphics specification .

2001-Mar-07

Version 0.31 of XSmiles was released. This is a multi-namespace XML browser, written in java. Supported namespaces include XSL-FO, SVG, SMIL, and XForms. Thereis also XSL-T and XPath support, and DOM2 support with the EcmaScript binding.

2001-Feb-12

CORDA Technologies released version 3.8 of Pop Chart,a Web-based charting and graphing program. Version 3.8 adds SVG export.

2001-Feb-04

Schemasoft has made slides (in SVG) available from a talk describing Catwalk, their SVG generator-generator - a graphical environment that allows non-programmers to automatically generate XSL-T stylesheets, which when run will produce SVG.

Programacion.net has an article Generar SVG desde XML mediante una XSLT by Joaquin Bravo which includes a worked example of generating an SVG barchart from an input XML doocument using XSL-T (in Spanish)

2001-Feb-02

The W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group has published an enhanced and updated version of the SVG Conformance Test Suite, the second public release. The results of testing six implementations against the test suite are also available.

2001-Jan-30

St. Mehlhos has made some SVG examples generated from the forthcoming version 6.1 of his 2D and 3D mathematical function plotting program, Funktion, which is expected to be available some time in February. The current version (5.4) may be downloaded, but lacks the SVG export. (German user interface).

2001-Jan-29

ITEDO software announce version 5 of IsoDraw, a technical illustration package which is especially suited to the production of parallel perspective technical illustrations. Version 5 adds SVG and WebCGM export. The are also German versions of the announcement and product details.

2001-Jan-18

Version 0.4 of Webdraw, previously known as Trajectory Pro, is available from JASC. WebDraw is a native SVG editor - SVG files may be loaded, edited in either graphical or source views, and saved. It supports the November 2 Candidate Recommendation of SVG. There is a newsgroup for discussion and feedback.

2001-Jan-11

Michael Bierman announced version 2.0 beta3 of the Adobe SVG Viewer, supporting the 2 November Candidate Recommendation of the SVG specification. There are bug report and feedback forms.

2001-Jan-06

Software Mechanics announced the release of SVGmaker, a Windows NT and 2000 printer driver which directly generates SVG files from any Windows program. Their site has examples generated from Microsoft Excel 97 and AutoCAD R13. The program is shareware; an evaluation version is available which produces watermarked files until registered .

2001-Jan-05

The SAVAGE SVG TOOLKIT from Savage Software will shortly be going into beta. Its a server-side implementation of the SVG DOM and provides the means to programmatically create, modify, query, validate and output SVG elements. The initial beta will be for Win32 servers, with *nixes to follow later.

2001-Jan-03

Jeroen Dekker of The Graphics Connection announced that My company (Square One) is currently working on adding SVG export to our graphics conversion suite The Graphics Connection and also said We expect to have a beta release of PS/EPS to SVG available shortly, which we will then announce to the members of this list. Square One strongly believes in the possibilities and the future of SVG, and this filter will act as a bridge to enable the mass generation of SVG content from all sorts of applications - including CAD/CAM, EDA and GIS.

2001-Jan-02

Adobe announced Beta 2 of their SVG Viewer, v2.0. As with beta 1, bug report and feedback forms are available. Release notes for Windows and Macintosh versions are in PDF format.

Version 0.16 of FOP has improved SVG support, in particular improvements in the Java bindings. They also mention close cooperation with the Batik project.

2000-Dec-31

Ravi Mendis announced SVGObjects Framework, a set of WebObjects components for dynamically generating and serving SVG.

2000-Dec-21

The XML.com 12 Days of XML Christmas by Leigh Dodds includes SVG as one of the gifts ....

2000-Dec-11

An updated release of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit was announced. New features include animateMotion support, and updating to the November 2nd CR SVG spec.

2000-Dec-04

The first public release of the Batik open-source SVG viewer was made available by the Apache Project.

2000-Nov-30

FOP 0.15.0 is the latest release of the Apache XML formatting object processor. New features since the last (0.14.0) release include better svg support (linear gradients, radial gradients, css style selectors, css colour names, patterns, path curves (except arcs), text tspan and tref, text whitespace handling, text outline and fill, switch, images (including external svg images) references in external svg documents, svg elements (below top element), and support for the symbol element).

2000-Nov-15

Sphinx open, a vector graphics editor with SVG export is available for evaluation. The new version 6.01 includes menus and help in both German and English. There are some demo pages showing SVG exported from sphinx open, including animations.

Steve White mentioned an upcoming SVG/DHTML editor, IMS Web Engine Version 2

2000-Nov-10

Michael Bierman announced availability of Adobe SVG Viewer 2.0 beta 1. Release notes for the Windows and Macintosh versions are available in PDF, and there are forms for feedback and bug reports.

Irène Vatton announced the release of Amaya 4.0 with support for editing mixed-namespace XHTML, SVG and MathML documents. Binaries are available for Windows NT/2000, Windows 9x, x86 Linux, Sparc Solaris, AIX, IRIX HP-UX and OSF-1. Source is also available.

2000-Nov-09-

Christophe VanTighem announced Celinea CR2V, a raster to vector converter which outputs SVG. Fitting is done with curves as well as lines, and there is intelligent merging of non significant regions.

An article by Joan Mas, SVG: Present i futur dels formats de gràfic vectorial per a la web (in Catalan; also available in Spanish).

2000-Nov-08

The prolific Dean and Bella announced the port of CSIRO SVG Viewer for Pocket PC's

Sebastian Hagen announced the beta of Spinx Open, an editor which can export to SVG - including export of animations.

2000-Nov-02

An update to the SVG Candidate Recommendation is published, incorporating feedback and clarifications to date. Here is the list of changes from the previous specification.

2000-Oct-10

Dean and Bella announced a new release of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit. The license has changed from BSD-style to Apache, and there are a bunch of bug fixes. Other features include improved support for CSS selectors, text-anchor, cursors, improved animation, and some filter suport.

Leonard Rosenthol announced that Digital Applications will be releasing the C/C++ sources to our SVG tools (SVG2PDF and SVGImage) very shortly.

2000-Oct-08

Steve White has five articles available:

2000-Sep-24

The RiscOS Draw to SVG converter by Steven Simpson is updated.

2000-Sep-15

The paper Vector-based Web Cartography: Enabler SVG by andré m. winter and andreas neumann is now available in English. The German version, Kartographie im Internet auf Vektorbasis, mit Hilfe von SVG nun möglich remains available. There is also a page of SVG examples

2000-Sep-13

Sphinx open now has SVG support, and there are some demo pages showing SVG exported from sphynx. (in German)

2000-Aug-29

Corel Draw 10 is announced at Seybold, with SVG support

2000-Aug-28

The Windows metafile (WMF) to SVG converter is once more online, (at a new address). WMF files can be uploaded, and are returned as SVG files.

2000-Aug-23

Leonard Rosenthol announced: Also, next week at Seybold, Digital Applications (the folks I work for), will be announcing some new SVG tools, including an SVG->JPEG application for use server-side (Mac OS, Windows, Unix)

2000-Aug-22

A Pict2SVG converter is released for the Mac platform by Chuck Houpt. Dcumentation also available in Japanese

2000-Aug-17

CreativePro.com run an article, The Creative Toolbox: Open-Standard Upstart SVG Takes on Macromedia's SWF by George Penston

2000-Aug-16

Michael Bierman announced French, German, and Japanese localizations of the Adobe SVG viewer. All localisations are available at either the US or Japanese sites.

2000-Aug-07

W3C publishes a Note, Accessibility Features of SVG by Charles McCathieNevile and Marja-Riitta Koivunen.

ZDNet eWEEK has an SVG article, XML takes on graphics by Roberta Holland

2000-Aug-06

A new 20000806 version of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit was announced. The new features include support for the latest 02 August Candidate Recommendation of SVG

2000-Aug-04

SVG made the top headline on MacWEEK with a story A milestone for SVG by Stephen Beale. There is also a lively discussion thread at the end of that article.

SVG is the featured subject this month at Sun's XML page. In the spotlight are the articles Scalable Vector Graphics: An Executive Summary by Vincent Hardy and Generating SVG with JSP (Java Server pages) while the developer connection has an Article on Graphics2D SVG Generator and downloads for the SVG Slide Toolkit and Graphics 2D SVG generator. Another way to generate SVG on the fly, server-side is using XSL-T, so the article XSL- T Compiler is likely to be of interest; it describes how to compile an XSL-T transformation into a Java class.

2000-Aug-03

IntraNet Solutions announced its support of the Scalable Vector Graphics Specification (SVG) in their Xpedio Content Management solution, which includes the ability to extract vector information from proprietary formats and store it as SVG.

MacWeek mentions SVG going to CR on their quicklinks news page

Internet Watch covered the announcement of CR status for SVG: W3C、ベクター方式の画像形式「SVG」勧告候補を公開 by hiro@nakajima-gumi.net (in Japanese)

2000-Aug-02

Sun announced Tools to Help Developer Community Leverage XML Standards for Graphics.

An article on C|Net news.com, W3C promotes shrink-to-fit graphics by Paul Festa.

W3C has issued SVG as a Candidate Recommendation. Here is the list of changes from previous versions. With the move to Candidate Recommendation, W3C is saying that this specification is maturing and is now ready for more widespread implementation testing. You can read the Press Release and Testimonials that were issued today.

Using the W3C SVG Test Suite, the SVG Working Group will be evaluating existing and new SVG implementations and preparing a report on their quality and interoperability. The Candidate Recommendation phase will end when there is at least one implementation that passes each one of the Basic Effectivity tests in the test suite . The SVG Working Group then anticipates asking for the specification to move to Proposed Recommendation status.

2000-Jul-29 Steady State Software released an updated TrueType to SVG font converter
2000-Jul-12

A new 20000712 version of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit was announced. The new features include support for the latest 29 June draft of SVG, and rendering of SVG Fonts.

Not coincidentally, Steady State Software have made available a TrueType to SVG font converter, in Java with source.

2000-Jul-10

Beatware, Inc. announced e-Picture Pro (formerly e-Picture 2.0), and committed to provide add-on SVG export, free of charge to registered customers once the SVG specification becomes a W3C Recommendation.

2000-June-30 The first public alpha release of Jackaroo is announced.
2000-June-29

The ninth working draft of SVG was released to the public. This adresses most of the comments from the second last call period. Here is the list of changes from previous versions.

2000-Jun-14 An article by Fabrice Neuman entitled Des images vectorisées pour le Web on Yahoo! France (in French)
2000-Jun-06 A new 20000606 version of the CSIRO SVG Toolkit was released.
2000-June-02 Jasc Software announced the release of version 0.3of Jasc Trajectory Pro. It implements the 03 March draft of Stylable SVG. new features include support for authoring native SVG filter effects to objects and text. There is a newsgroup to discuss Trajectory Pro.
2000-Jun-01 Version 5.2.2 of ImageMagick now includes some support for rendering of SVG
2000-May-19 Corel announce the final beta SVG import/export filter for Corel Draw. It generates content conforming to the March 03 spec, Stylable SVG). SVG files can now be imported as well as exported using this version of the SVG filter; there is also both internal and external Cascading Style Sheets support and improved performance.
2000-Apr-27 IBM announced version 0.4a of the IBM SVG Viewer. It uses the Xerces XML parser, can save a rendered SVG image as a JPEG, and has an interactive XML DOM viewer
2000-Apr-20

Adobe announced Illustrator 9 with SVG export. Advances over the SVG export from Illustrator 8 include transparency, hyperlinking and JavaScript support. More details on the Adobe site.

An update to the Adobe SVG browser plugin, Active-X control and Adobe Illustrator 8 export plugin is also announced, updating support to the 3 March working draft.

2000-Apr-13

An article on SVG and Trajectory Pro, 新しいベクター画像形式SVGに対応したドローソフト「Trajectory Pro」 (in Japanese)

2000-Apr-12

The SVG in Mozilla Project now has its own project page, where status updates can be found. The nifty logo is. of course, also available in SVG.

2000-Apr-12

A new version 0.9 CSIRO SVG Toolkit is released. The announcement summarises the changes from previous versions; there is also fuller documentation of the supported features. Hilights include SVG DOM support, a CSS parser, DOM level 2, and the ability to be used as a converter from SVG to various raster image formats.

2000-Apr-10

Jackaroo now has a full list of supported features

2000-Apr-07 The Electronic Publishing Research Group at Nottingham University have a Flash to SVG converter and some SVG Perl libraries
2000-Apr-05

A four-part article on SVG: Grafiken mit XML by Holger Reibold, in Internet Professionell Net Tech (in German)

2000-Apr-05

Preview Release 0.2 of Trajectory Pro, the SVG authoring tool from JASC, is now available. There is a list of new features, enhancements and fixes, and discussion continues on the Trajectory Pro newsgroup.

2000-Apr-03

Version 5.1.0 of the Grace plotting tool for scientific data now has SVG export support.

2000-Mar-20

The KDE Illustration app for Linux, killustrator 0.7.2, has SVG export

2000-Mar-07

Digapp release a technology preview of an SVG2PDF converter. It runs on MacOS, Windows 95/98/2000 and NT 4.

2000-Mar-03

The eighth working draft of SVG was released to the public. It enters a second last call period. Here is the list of changes from previous versions.

Jackaroo, a new implementation of Stylable SVG, is announced by the Koala team. Its written in Java, and uses DOM Juan, a small-footprint DOM Level 2 implementation, to get access to the XML and CSS for rendering.

Quark pledged support for SVG in Quark Express at Seybold, Boston.

2000-Mar-01

JASC announced the first prototype version of Trajectory Pro, an authoring tool for SVG that is expected to support animation and interactivity in later releases. It runs on Windows 9x/NT4/2000. The internal format of Trajectory Pro appears to be SVG, and the XML source can be viewed at any time during editing. There is a newsgroup for feedback and discussion.

2000-Feb-29

A half-page article "SVG: le vectoriel en ligne" in the first (Mars/Avril) issue of French magazine Create (tout reste à inventer), plus coverage of SVG in LiveMotion.

On Designer.com, Part II of The Future Of Web Design, by Anthony Celeste covers MNG and SVG.

2000-Feb-25 Version 3.17 of ps2edit translates PostScript and PDF to, among other things, SVG. The free version outputs to a wide variety of formats, and comes with source; the shareware version adds plugins (no-source) to also export MIF, CGM, SVG, EMF and RTF. Ghostscript is required, as a PostScript interpreter. The SVG-exporting version runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000, Solaris, or Linux.
2000-Feb-20

A new raster-to-vector program, AutoTrace, exports to several formats including SVG. In addition to tracing using lines, it can also trace using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) curves. Full source is available (GPL), and it runs on a variety of 'nices (Linux, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX), Windows, and OS/2.

A demonstration of Chemistry applications of SVG by David Rzepa of Imperial College, London. includes both reaction diagrams and 2D views of 3D conformation

2000-Feb-17 An SVG output filter for DrawTool, described by Toby Jaffey as "a series of toy programs (most notably a logo interpreter) which ... can now output both PostScript and SVG" is available from Project Purple. Source (GPL) available, in Perl; uses GTK.
2000-Feb-16 An issue of Style matters by Didier Martin, entitled Component-Based Page Layouts, covers translating XML and XLink to HTML using XSL-T, including transforming XLinks (pointing to SVG files) into inline SVG images.
2000-Feb-15 Adobe announces the public availability of their SVG Export plug-in for Adobe Illustrator 8.01 (Mac and Win), SVG display plug-in for Netscape 4.x (Mac and Win), and SVG display ActiveX control for MS IE5 and MS Word (Win). These had been widely demonstrated to the public, but had previously required registration and signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The preview site includes examples and a detailed tutorial. Also available in Japanese.
2000-Feb-13

Scripting News reports on some experiences using the Mayura Draw for SVG export, and the Adobe SVG plug-in.

Carmen Delessio announced a WMF to SVG servlet which allows WMF from Visio and MS Word, among others, to be converted.

2000-Feb-8

An article on SVG in general, and Adobe LiveMotion in particular at france.internet.com (in French).

2000-Jan-26 A fourth beta SVG export filter for CorelDraw 9 is now available for download.
2000-Jan-17 Jon Udell of BYTE Magazine discusses SVG as one way of dynamically generating a graph of constantly-updated data. Anyone care to produce an SVG alternative to the table-based, HTML graph in that article?
2000-Jan-15 Sketch, the SVG-enabled drawing program for Linux and other 'nices now has a new Web page, and is bundled with Mandrake Linux.
2000-Jan-13 An article on SVG in issue 59 of PC Extra magazine (in Swedish) including a sample graphic of a boat.
2000-Jan-05 Beatware announces e-Picture 2.0 will have SVG export. e-Picture will be available for BeOS, MacOS,and Windows.
1999-Dec-15 A new version, 0.3c of the IBM SVGViewer was released today on Alphaworks. Improvements include conformance to the 3 December SVG Working Draft; performance tuning, particularly for paths; bug fixes, and better 'symbol' and 'use' support - plus more example files.
1999-Dec-15 The third beta of a Corel Draw SVG export plug-in was released.
1999-Dec-15 A raster to vector converter with SVG output was released by a research group including Koichi Mori, a graduate student at University of Tsukuba, Japan. It reads 8bit-per-pixel Windows BMP files, and runs on Windows 95/98/NT. It generates not only lines, but also curves, to match the raster shapes.
1999-Dec-3

The seventh working draft of SVG was released to the public. Here is the list of changes from previous versions.

1999-Dec-1 A new version 0.6.3 of Sketch, the Python drawing program for Linux and other Unices which both imports and exports SVG.
1999-Nov-29 Version 0.3b of the IBM SVG Viewer is released. In addition to bug fixes, there is support for 'symbol' and 'use', gradient-filling on text, plus a progressive rendering feature
1999-Nov-29 XYZ Sistemas Industriales, S.A. announced the SVG Internet Mapper. Its an exciting application of on-the-fly generated SVG, with dynamic capabilities such as linking to additional information. (It also uses HTML, and so requires an SVG plug-in; and it uses the 'embed' tag so won't work with viewers that use the 'applet' tag.) They are asking for feedback to help improve this mapper.
1999-Nov-26

A new version 0.8 CSIRO SVG Viewer is released. There is a list of changes from previous versions

An article in PRIMonline: SVG - a grafika istene by Zsad୹i Pઠ(in Hungarian)

1999-Nov-19 A new article on WebDeveloper.com, entitled Get Ready for the Awesome Power of SVG, by Kas Thomas.
1999-Nov-15 ILOG announced SVG support in their JViews Component Suite. System integrators can now produce SVG-enabled thin clients, and display mapping data, graphs, or Gantt charts using JViews.
1999-Nov-11 Article on Scalable Vector Graphics - Web Graphics with Original Quality Artwork by Tad Lane, includes examples
1999-Nov-10

An article on SVG in MacSimple, by Kas Thomas. And don't miss part two.

An article on good Web design with CSS and SVG (in Danish, also available in English) by Bent Rasmussen

1999-Oct-29 Corel announce the second public beta of an SVG export filter for Corel Draw 9.
1999-Oct-26 Infoworld has a story by Michael Lattig about the IBM AFP to SVG transcoder.
1999-Oct-23 SVGView 0.3a now supports the Aug 12th W3C SVG Working Draft. It provides several important enhancements, including improved network support.
1999-Oct-22 A demo of IBM AFP to SVG transcoder is available from alphaworks. Advanced Function Print (AFP) is an IBM print format, and this transcoder allows AFP documents to be viewed on the web by acting as a proxy which converts them to SVG.
1999-Oct-20 The Builder.com SVG article is now available in Czech.
1999-Oct-19 A new beta of Mayura Draw, with improved SVG export, was released.
1999-Oct-14 An article by Michael Durwin of Shore.Net on SVG
1999-Oct-13 An article on XML Namespaces by Pankaj Kamthan includes examples which mix XHTML , MathML, and SVG.
1999-Oct-08

An interview with Chris Lilley about SVG on Builder.Com discusses the features, benefits, implementation status and likely impact of SVG.

1999-Sep-22 Sketch, an illustration program for Unix-like systems ( Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, IRIX) by Bernhard Herzog has SVG import and export support in version 0.62. Sketch is written in Python.
1999-Sep-20 Takahashi Masahiro (高橋 雅博) released a new version of his SVG Viewer (Japanese documentation). Its 100% pure Java, uses Java 1.2, and supports both JPEG and PNG inline images (using com.sun.image.codec.jpeg of JDK 1.2 for JPEG, and JAI1.0 for PNG). Basic shapes, paths and text are implemented.
1999-Sep-18 Concordia University Computa£ional Mathematics Laboratory has a site devoted to SVG
1999-Sep-17 Mayura Draw 3.6beta now has SVG export support. Mayura Draw comes with some SVG samples exported from it:
1999-Sep-16 FOP, an XSL Formatting Objects to PDF converrter, now has a "tiny bit of SVG support" according to it's author, James Tauber. It generates XSL FO output, with embedded SVG, and renders this all to PDF taking advantage of the pluggable element handlers for rendering the SVG portion. See example PDF slides made from XM· source (including SVG) using XSL-T and FOP.
1999-Sep-14 A talk by Chris Lilley on SVG at XML World in Ottawa is now online. David Sims reports on this talks.
Slides require a CSS 1 enabled HTML browser for decent display, and the slides are optimised for 1024x768.
1999-Sep-14 A new version 0.71 CSIRO SVG Viewer is released.
1999-Sep-07 Mayura Draw will have SVG export support
1999-Sep-06 An article 'Doing It With SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Part 1by Ken Sall, has a good introduction to SVG and includes reviews of IBM SVGView and CSIRO SVG viewer, hints on minimising SVG graphic size, and pointers to further information. We await Part 2!
1999-Sep-02 Sodipodi 0.11, described by it's author Lauris Kaplinski as "a toy" nevertheless can import and export SVG. It runs on Linux, uses Gnome, and comes with GPL'ed source.
1999-Aug-30 Corel announce the public beta of an SVG export filter for Corel Draw 9, at the Seybold SF publishing conference. They also anticipate having SVG import capability later on.
1999-Aug-30 SVG article on designer.com
1999-Aug-24 Version 0.2a of IBM SVGView is posted on alphaworks.
1999-Aug-17 Version 0.5 of the CSIRO SVG viewer is released.
1999-Aug-13 An article on SVG at webreview.com.
1999-Aug-12

The sixth Working Draft of SVG goes to last call. Here is the list of changes from the fifth draft. Detailed review comments, both from users and implementors, are encouraged and should be sent to svg-comments@w3.org. Detailed discussion should continue to take place on the www-svg@w3.org mailing list.

1999-Aug-11 The Web 3D Consortium issued a press release to announce that they have joined W3C, that X3D will be part of the next generation ISO VRML 2002 standard and that they are working on X3D interoperability with XHTML, XML, SVG, DOM and SMIL.
1999-Jul-30 The IBM SVGView SVG viewer, written in Java 2, is posted on alphaworks. It uses the IBM XML4J parser.
1999-Jul-30

The fifth Working Dra·t of SVG was released. Here is the list of changes from the fourth draft.

1999-Jul-29 An article SVG - What's in it for us? by Janus Boye is published on irt.org
1999-Jul-21 Dean Jackson of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences announced an SVG Viewer in Java, with source. It uses the Sun XML parser.
1999-Jul-20 Gill adds inline image support, including full PNG transparency
1999-Jul-06

The fourth Working Draft of SVG was released. See the list of changes from the third draft.

1999-Jun-25

The third working draft of SVG was released. See the list of changes from the second draft.

1999-Jun-23 Raph Levien posted an essay on fonts in SVG which points out the importance of consistent rendering across implementations and the need for a single, dependable font format for SVG to use.
1999-Jun-21 A first version of Gill, the Gnome Illustration application is announced. The author of Gill, Raph Levien, says that it 'will eventually support all of SVG'. Gnome will work on any Unix platform.
1999-Jun-21 IBM demonstrate a prototype SVG Viewer, in Java 2, at Java One.
1999-Jun-05 An article on SVG in Mozillazine announces that Jeremy Lea has started an SVG project for Mozilla.
1999-May-14 Chris Lilley of W3C, Jon Ferraiolo of Adobe and Vincent Hardy of Sun gave SVG talks on developers day at the Eighth International Web Conference. Ken Sall wrote up a review for Web Developers Virtual Library which concluded SVG is a near term reality.
1999-May-10 A Java SVG renderer, with source, is first announced on the www-svg mailing list by Carmen Delessio of BlackDirt Software. It uses the IBM XML4J parser. A Windows Metafile to SVG converter, again in Java with source, is also announced.
1999-Apr-28 A technology preview implementation of an SVG renderer, by Adobe, is demonstrated to the public at the XML Europe 99 conference in Granada, Spain. (no, it isn't publically available yet)
1999-Apr-12

A new SVG Working Draft was released. Here are the changes from the previous public draft.

1999-Mar-04 Webmonkey has a Sneak Peek at SVG written by Steve Mulder
1999-Feb-15 SVG news coverage:

An SVG page is added to the Yahoo! Graphics Formats entry

1999-Feb-12 SVG news coverage:
1999-Feb-11

First public draft of SVG was released