resvg is an SVG rendering library.

resvg can be used as:

• a Rust library
• a C library (see capi)
• a CLI application (see tools/rendersvg)

too render SVG files based on a static SVG Full 1.1 subset (see SVG support for details).

The core idea is to make a fast, small, portable, multiple backend SVG library designed for edge-cases.

SVG can be rendered to a raster image or to a backend's canvas (like to QWidget via QPainter).

resvg is trying to compete with librsvg, QtSvg and Inkscape (only as a CLI SVG to PNG converter).

One of the main differences from other rendering libraries is that resvg does a lot of preprocessing before rendering. It converts shapes to paths, resolves attributes, removes groups and invisible elements, fixes a lot of issues in malformed SVG files. Then it creates a simple rendering tree with all elements and attributes resolved. And only then starts to render. So it's very easy to implement a new rendering backend.

More details here.

librsvg is the main competitor to the resvg. And even though that librsvg itself is being rewritten in Rust, as resvg, the architecture of the library is completely different:

• librsvg, currently, is heavily tied to cairo library, unlike resvg
• librsvg is heavily tied to GNOME which makes it painful to distribute outside the Linux ecosystem
• librsvg doesn't really preprocess input files, rendering them as is
• librsvg has a minimal support of the edge-cases, which leads to rendering errors

Inkscape is often used to convert SVG to PNG, but it's not an actual competitor to resvg, because it's still a complete SVG editor, not a tiny library. Also, it's very slow. But it has the best SVG support amongst others.

Without a doubt, QtSvg is heavily used in Qt applications. But QtSvg itself is very limited. It officially supports only a tiny portion of the SVG Tiny 1.2 subset. In simple terms - it correctly renders only primitive SVG images.

resvg is aiming to support only the static SVG subset. E.g. no a, script, view, cursor elements and no animations.

Also, filter, marker, textPath and embedded fonts are not yet implemented.

Results of the static subset of the SVG test suite:

Results of the resvg test suite:

You can find a complete table of supported features here. It also includes alternative libraries.

• librsvg is slower than resvg because Oxygen Icon Theme is using Gaussian blur heavily, which is expensive.
• QtSvg is fast because it doesn't support Gaussian blur, clipPath, mask and pattern that are heavily used in the Oxygen Icon Theme.
• Inkscape and Batik are slow just because.
• More details.

resvg supports Qt and cairo backends.

• resvg - rendering backends implementation
  • usvg - an SVG simplification tool
    • svgdom - a DOM-like SVG tree
      • svgtypes - SVG types parser and writer
      • xmlparser - an XML parser
    • rctree - a DOM-like tree
  • resvg-qt - a minimal bindings for Qt

All other dependencies aren't written by me for this project.

See docs/build.md for details.

resvg is licensed under the MPLv2.0.