Hello Jens,

SVG inside IE is definitely a problem. The last update of the Adobe SVG viewer dates back to 2001 and although Adobe won't withdraw ASV3 it is very likely that technical problems with future IE versions will increase, esp. with IE8 and IE9.

I see several workarounds. Some of them might be suitable for you, some not.

* use another browser. If your SVG is for Intranet use it is reasonable to install another browser. Opera 9x has excellent support for SVG and the upcoming releases will already have some SVG 1.2 support. Safari is probably performance-wise the best SVG viewer. Firefox3 has quite remarkable performance increases over Firefox2. FF3 release date is very soon. All three browsers actively improve SVG support - at least to cover full SVG 1.1 support in future releases. Mozilla is the only browser that doesn't support SVG fonts, currently, which might be a problem. I know that for content on the Internet, the advice to use another browser might not be always feasible.

* you can use Apache Batik as an applet within IE and display the SVG within that applet - see an example here: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/demo.html - the cool thing with Batik as an applet is that it even allows HTML/SVG communication, the drawback is that it loads a little longer and it requires Java2, which to my knowledge isn't present on all Windows machines. However, it seems to work across all browsers.

* Renesis: I don't exactly know their roadmap and I don't expect them to be in feature parity with Adobe SVG and other native SVG implementations in the next year or two - I may be wrong though. The current versions of Renesis are still incomplete and a bit buggy

* the bitflash viewer from Quickoffice (an Opentext subsidiary), although targetting mobile viewers and the SVG 1.2 tiny profile, is excellent - and there may be a way to use it as an ActiveX component within IE. This viewer is excellent in performance and uses fewer system resources than other viewers, but it doesn't support all of the SVG 1.1 full profile. The viewer isn't publically available - they mainly sell the viewer to mobile phone companies - but it may be worth a try contacting them about an IE plugin.

* similar to the Bitflash viewer, there is the Ikivo SVG mobile viewer which may be worth a try. If you want to contact either Bitflash or Ikivo - let me know. I have some contacts. I think both companies may be interested in providing a solution. Both viewers support animation and scripting (although not the full DOM but the MicroDOM)

* use an Ajax toolkit like dojo.gfx. dojo.gfx accepts static SVG content (like path strings) and can render it either to VML or Silverlight (in case of IE) or to SVG in all other browsers (Safari, Opera, Firefox)

* there are also projects to render SVG content inside the flash plugin. I believe that it mainly renders static content.

Finally I would suggest that you contact the Microsoft IE team (Chris Wilson) and tell them about your requirements. They may not listen to average Joe or small companies, but they may be more open to big companies like yours, esp. if you tell them you may switch to alternative browsers. IE8 will not support SVG natively, but IE9 may, if enough customers demand SVG support. Chris Wilsons answer when people ask about SVG support inside IE, is usually that they are looking into it and the acknowledge that SVG is a W3C standard that many people demand. However, they are technology wise quite far behind other browsers (think about CSS, full DOM3 support, proper XHTML support). They first need to fix those issues before they start working on SVG. SVG, being an XML technology needs to build on those.

It is interesting to see more and more large companies being interested in SVG. I know of a big car insurance company who uses SVG for documentation purposes (Intranet), other big companies who use SVG for technical documentation. Also, business companies like SAP keep a close eye on the technology.

Let me know if you need any further information regarding the above proposals. Depending on your exact requirements, one or the other approaches may work or may not.

Andreas

Rottgardt, Jens (K-SIB-2/3) wrote:

Hi,

to view SVG in IE I use the Adobe SVG Viewer Plugin. The plugin is not longer supported from Adobe and I am looking for a new plugin. Are any other viewers for IE available ? My tests with IE 7 have shown problems, eg. SVG overlaps divs as you can see in the screenshot. I have already tested the Renesis Player without success!

I know that this is not a special Inkscape question but due to the enormous SVG know how of the community I hope to get a recommendation !

<<screenshot IE 7.jpg>>

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