.. _rfc73:

==============================================================================
MS RFC 73: Improved SVG symbols support
==============================================================================

:Date: 2011/05/19
:Authors: Zak James (zjames at dmsolutions.ca)
:Authors: Yewondwossen Assefa (yassefa at dmsolutions.ca)
:Last Edited: 2011/05/19
:Status:  Proposed
:Version: MapServer 6.2
:Id: $Id$

Overview
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The SVG format offers several advantages over existing mapserver symbol types
but existing support is limited. We propose the implementation of complete
support using the libsvg-cairo library, part of the cairo project.


Technical Solution
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All renderers will be extended with an added supports_svg flag, set to 0 for
all but the cairo renderer. When an SVG symbol is requested, other renderers
will trigger a call to msRenderSVGToPixmap which will parse the referenced svg
file (using libsvg-cairo) and render the svg into the symbol's pixmapbuffer
using cairo. After this operation, normal pixmap symbol handling will be used.

For the cairo renderer, the renderSVGSymbolCairo function will use libsvg-cairo
to parse the symbol, but will then use the cairo api to render the symbol
directly.

Configure.in will be modified to detect the --with-libsvg-cairo configure
option and define USE_LIBSVG_CAIRO.

Existing Partial Implementation
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this rfc is adopted the existing SVG symbol code
(see http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3343) would be superceeded
and would be removed.

The proposed implementation will reuse the existing changes to the parser
but the approach for reading and rendering the symbols would be different.
It will use an existing SVG parser which includes a more complete SVG
implementation and will pass through the SVG instructions directly in
the case of a cairo (pdf or postscript) outputformat to improve
quality. Additionally, this version will pre-scale and rotate the SVG before
rasterizing with agg to avoid bitmap artifacts.

Usage example
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::

  SYMBOL
    NAME "svgsymbol"
    TYPE SVG
    IMAGE "/path/to/symbol.svg"
  END



... once defined, the symbol is used within the mapfile like any other.

Backwards Compatibility Issues
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are no compatibility issues with existing mapfiles. The SVG symbol type
is already allowed within a SYMBOLSET. SVG Symbol support will be disabled by
default. Enabling it will require installation of the libsvg-cairo library
available from 
* http://cairographics.org/snapshots/libsvg-cairo-0.1.6.tar.gz

Affected Files
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* mapserver.h
* mapdraw.c
* mapdummyrenderer.c
* maprendering.c
* mapsymbol.c
* mapsymbol.h
* mapcairo.c
* mapagg.cpp
* configure.in

Ticket Id
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3671



Voting History
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+1 from DanielM, SteveW, ThomasB, SteveL, MichaelS, AssefaY