SVG viewer

What it drawsCopy Anchor Link

A vector drawing, drawn as a drawing. A plasmid map, an exported figure, a tree exported from this application or another one: the file is displayed as the picture it is rather than as its path data.

What opens in itCopy Anchor Link

Files with an SVG extension. A raster image — PNG, JPEG, TIFF, a micrograph — opens in the image viewer instead. A PDF opens in the PDF viewer, even when its content is entirely vector.

What this computesCopy Anchor Link

Nothing about your data. An SVG is a drawing and it is displayed as one. What this canvas computes is what is needed to describe the file and to draw it safely, and the second is the reason the section is not empty.

• Whether the file is really an SVG, from its contents.
• Its intrinsic dimensions and aspect ratio, and its element count, so a file can be described before it is drawn.
• Its title and desc, when it declares them — the accessible name a figure ought to carry.
• Whether the file is active: whether it contains scripts, event handlers, animation, references to remote resources, or embedded data URIs.

That last determination is the point. An SVG is an active document, and a file in your project came from somewhere else by definition — so this viewer draws it in an image context, where by specification no script runs, no event fires and no external resource is fetched. The isolation is a property of how the file is drawn, not of a list of dangerous patterns someone has to keep current, and what that costs is reported rather than hidden.

Reading itCopy Anchor Link

An SVG is not a bitmap. It is an active document that can carry scripts, event handlers, animation and references to remote resources, and a file in your project came from somewhere else by definition. So this viewer draws the file in an image context, where by specification no script runs, no event fires and no external resource is fetched. The isolation is a property of how the file is drawn, not of a list of dangerous patterns that someone has to keep current.

What that costs is real and is reported rather than hidden. Three features do not survive being drawn this way:

The viewer counts each of these in the file you opened and tells you which of them apply to this file, as an advisory. It never refuses to draw a file because of them — a static first frame of an animated figure is still the figure.

If a font did not load, text in the drawing may be positioned for a face that is not the one you are looking at, so a label can overlap where it would not in the original. That is the one misreading this canvas invites, and the Source view is how you check it.

ControlsCopy Anchor Link

Rendered / Source switches between the drawing and its markup. Source is a first-class view: it is how you check what a drawing actually contains, and it is also the honest destination when the file turns out not to be valid SVG at all — you see the bytes rather than an empty box.

Where it appearsCopy Anchor Link

As a stage tab and in the file manager's preview aside, identically.

Performance and limitsCopy Anchor Link

Drawing scales with the file's complexity rather than its pixel size: a figure with hundreds of thousands of paths is slow to draw at any zoom, where a simple drawing is instant at any size.

Below the minimum width the file is not drawn. A vector figure scaled into a very small box is a smudge, and drawing one would imply it had been looked at.

ScreenshotsCopy Anchor Link

No frame is committed for this canvas yet. What one would show: a plasmid map exported as SVG, reopened as a document and still selectable.

The absence is stated rather than left as a blank heading: a picture that does not exist yet is worth knowing about, and a placeholder would be worse than either.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link

The image viewer, for raster files; the map-image export, which writes SVG figures from a plasmid map.