On Sat, 2004-09-25 at 13:02, bulia byak wrote:

As far as I remember from our testing of various renderers, viewbox does not have any effect on the pixel/absolute ratio. Mental, can you please summarize what you found out by posting to the SVG list about this?

Correct; viewBox only applies a translation+scaling factor (which affects user and other units alike). [ user units (before any transformation) = pixels ]

If you try to use "real world" units within a viewBoxed document, they will be distorted by the viewBox depending on the particular UA's notion of the current resolution.

Conceivably, you could just avoid using a viewBox and user units altogether, except for one thing -- SVG paths can only be specified in user units.

Without a viewBox, of course, the real world -> user unit relationship will still vary depending on the resolution. So that won't work either.

In summary: everything but user and relative units (relative units being percent, em, and ex) are useless in SVG, except for the purpose of setting document size.

In practice, the only way to do "real world units" in SVG is to set the document dimensions in some absolute real world unit, establish a viewBox, and then use nothing but user and relative units in the document proper.

-mental