Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
[wtp-dev] Viewing SVG in Mozilla Firefox


SVG graphics were recently added to the API Progress Reports (kudos to Jeffrey Liu). These display nicely in Internet Explorer, but you have to do some work to make them display in Mozilla Firefox, and the result is not good. My recommendation is to use IE until the Mozilla support is ready for prime time.

1. Download the special binary build of Firefox that contains the SVG support.
2. Perform a magic incantation to enable SVG support.
3. The result is passable but not as good as in IE due to the current incomplete state of the support.

If this seems like an irresistable challenge to you, read on.

SVG is not included in the normal Firefox builds. You have to download a special SVG binary from the SVG page [1]. I downloaded the Windows XP GDI+ build [2]. Unzip this and look for firefox.exe in the bin directory.

Next you have to enable svg support. This is proclaimed in the notice:
There has recently been an important change to SVG enabled builds. SVG enabled builds now require you to set the 'svg.enabled' pref to 'true' before they will render SVG.

There is probably some prefs file you can edit. However, there is a slick way to do this via the browser [3]:
1. Open the magic URL about:config
2. Filter the listing with svg and look at the line that contains svg.enabled
3. This preference is false by default. Double click it to set it to true

Your're now ready to view SVG. For example [4] displays like this in IE:



But like this in Firefox:



[1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/build.html#win_gdi_dl
[2] ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/contrib/latest-trunk/firefox-win32-svg-GDI.zip
[3] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/tor/archives/2005/02/important_svg_b.html
[4] http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/I-I20050412-200504122240/apitools/svg/org.eclipse.jst.server.svg

Arthur Ryman,
Rational Desktop Tools Development

phone: +1-905-413-3077, TL 969-3077
assistant: +1-905-413-2411, TL 969-2411
fax: +1-905-413-4920, TL 969-4920
mobile: +1-416-939-5063, text: 4169395063@xxxxxxx
intranet: http://labweb.torolab.ibm.com/DRY6/

Back to the top