

So, what is an SVG document? Is SVG a vector file? It doesn’t matter how densely packed your new smartphone’s pixels are-vectors will always be displayed as crisply as freshly fallen snow, which isn’t always true of rasterized images.įile size is always an issue with the web (no one wants to wait for a 5TB image to load into the browser over a mobile connection). SVG is good for the web, especially these days, as it bypasses the problem of screen resolution.

The W3C comprises a group of clever folk who strive to standardize the web, making it an open and accessible place for everyone. So, what is the SVG format? The SVG format was developed, and continues to be maintained, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I hope that clarifies the issue and explains why keeping more metadata on round-tripping wouldn't actually solve the issue you are facing.What Is an SVG File and What Does SVG Stand For?

To clarify, this is not a reason of Illustrator being older than SVG but a way to handle the limitations of SVG.

Therefore, Illustrator considers SVG more of an export format than a native file format. InkScape runs into the same issue when opening such an SVG files from Illustrator as it is the other way around. Just like InkScape, you can preserve Illustrator's capabilities in SVG as well and Illustrator provides a fallback rendering for all SVG compatible implementations. Since the feature set of both applications are very different, a fulfilling round-trip experience won't be possible. However, this really just makes the SVG document an InkScape specific file format like Illustrator's own. * Illustrator, as any other SVG consuming application but InkScape itself, is only able to understand the SVG compatible fallback.Įven if Illustrator would try to keep more metadata from the originally imported SVG document and you do edits to the SVG document in Illustrator, those would not play nicely with InkScape since Illustrator would really only modify the fallback but not InkScapes enhancements.Īs said, InkScape enriches the SVG document with its own capabilities. * InkScape uses its own namespace to enrich SVG documents with the features that go beyond the capabilities of InkScape and provides a fallback for SVG compatible implementations. Every authoring tool has a different way to handle the limitations. * SVG has a very limited set of features considering the complexity of most illustration applications even beyond Adobe Illustrator. However, there are a lot of things to consider: I understand the issue that you are facing and I understand the request to support "a simple round-trip" experience for SVG.
