WDVL: CSIRO SVG Viewer

If you were wondering how we displayed the SVG image since there isn't currently browser support, wonder no more. You have several choices, two of which are detailed in this section and the next. Several more appear in the SVG Resources section at the end of this article.

The viewer we used in the previous section is called CSIRO SVG Viewer from the Mathematical and Information Sciences folks from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). They are experimenting with SVG for geospatial applications. At the time of this writing, they have the most up-to-date support for SVG having released version 0.6 of SVG Viewer about one week after W3C published the August 12, 1999 Working Draft.

CSIRO SVG Viewer
From the CSIRO demo page: "The viewer is a conforming SVG Interpreter and a partially conforming SVG Viewer. The viewer will parse an SVG document and validate it against the latest DTD (currently "svg-19990812.dtd"). A subset of all the graphic elements, attributes and properties are supported and rendered. Those that are have not been implemented yet are simply ignored (hopefully!)"

sis.cmis.csiro.au/svg/
Available for Java 1.2.* platforms. Requires:

JDK 1.2 because it draws with Java2D. Download from JavaSoft.
Sun's Java Project X library - Technology Release 2. Available from Javasoft Project X. To download, you need to establish a free account and then log into the Java Developers Connection.

Impressive Screenshots

Shapes
Rotated Text
Tiger (complicated paths)
Paths
Transforms
Opacity
Gradients
Gradient (Radial) Painting
WDVL's SVG Example 2 (original view)
WDVL's SVG Example 2 (zoomed in)
WDVL's SVG Example 2 (pan and zoom)

Examples/csiro-svg-viewer.bat
WDVL .bat file to run CSIRO SVG Viewer. After you download and unzip SVG Viewer, place this .bat file in the directory that contains the classes folder. Requires minor editing to specify location of JDK 1.2.* and the Java Project X parser. Can be executed from the command prompt or by clicking on the .bat file.

UPDATE! Just before we published this article we learned that the CSIRO team is preparing an applet version of the viewer. Look for it by the second week of September 1999. They are also considering a plugin version for Windows. So SVG in your browser is a near term reality.