Adobe^® SVG Viewer for Macintosh

Contents

• About the SVG Viewer
• System requirements
• How to install the SVG Viewer
• How to copy Netscape plug-ins into other Browsers
• How to view SVG files in your Web browser
• How to turn artwork into SVG
• Tips and Hints
• Known Problems
• Contact Information
• Copyright Notice
• More Information on Adobe's support for SVG

About the SVG Viewer

The Adobe SVG Viewer supports Stylable SVG from the "last call" W3C draft specification for Scalable Vector Graphics published on 3/3/00. Please keep in mind that the specification is under development, and will continue to evolve until it is made a recommended specification sometime later in the year 2000.

How to install the SVG Viewer

1. Before installing, please close any application which you have used to view SVG with an old version of the control.
2. Execute the downloaded file.

How to copy Netscape plug-ins into other Browsers

If you install another copy of Netscape or Internet Explorer which is supported by the Netscape plug-in, you can copy the following files into your plug-ins folder to view SVG from within that browser:

• SVG Plugin
• SVGViewer.zip

How to view SVG files in your Web browser

Once you install the Adobe SVG Viewer, you should be able to view any SVG file that you export from Illustrator in any supported Web browser.

How to turn artwork into SVG

You can export SVG from Illustrator 9. (To create SVG artwork with Illustrator 8.01, install the Adobe Illustrator SVG format plug-in, which works with the English version of Illustrator 8.01.) You can create your artwork in Illustrator, export it as SVG, and then add any JavaScript interactivity, animation, or filter effects by hand.

Tips and Hints

System Requirements

• System 8.5 through 9.0
• Netscape Navigator or Communicator versions 4.07 through 4.73, or Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher (static SVG only)
• 10 MB of hard disk space
• 48 MB of RAM recommended

Note: The SVG Viewer installer increases the memory partitions for supported browsers so that you can view SVG correctly. If you decrease the browser memory partitions, you might not be able to view some SVG graphics any more. The following table lists the memory required for each browser:

Known Problems with the SVG Viewer

All Browsers

• The SVG Viewer currently treats glyph-orientation-vertical as if it were 0 by default, when the specified default is 'auto'. This means that in order for this property to work correctly in the future when the Viewer supports it, you'll need to include the style "glyph-orientation-vertical:0" on any vertical text.
• It's possible for elements near the edge of an SVG graphic to not receive a mouseout event.
• For filter effects with filterUnits="objectBoundingBox", the Viewer currently treats lengths on filter nodes as if the filterUnits were userSpaceOnUse.
• The Mac Viewer is unable to handle very short audio clips. To help insure that a short audio clip is not dropped, it's best to include some leading silence (or some other snippet of audio which can be dropped), and then adjust the timing accordingly.

Internet Explorer

• Internet Explorer on the Macintosh does not provide JavaScript access to plug-ins. This means that the Adobe SVG Viewer plug-in for the Macintosh can't use JavaScript, and so SVG viewed in Internet Explorer for the Macintosh won't be interactive (although declarative animation still works). Additional side-effects of this are that the "View Source" command is not supported on Internet Explorer on the Mac, and the "About Adobe SVG Viewer" command goes to the SVG page at Adobe.com instead of displaying the about box graphic.
• Internet Explorer may crash if you view complex SVG files. You can usually work around this problem by increasing Internet Explorer's memory partition.
• Do not use the deprecated align attribute on the embed tag when embedding SVG files in HTML. Internet Explorer on the Mac will often not draw or print plug-ins that are embedded with these attributes.
• Internet Explorer will sometimes fail to pass the SVG file on to the Viewer (it will pass an empty file, instead) if the SVG file has a <script> element in it, and no XML prolog. Instead, Internet Explorer will try to interpret the SVG file as HTML, even if the server is sending the correct MIME type for SVG. To work around this problem, make sure you always include an XML prolog in all SVG files.
• If you want to drag and drop an SVG file from the Finder into Internet Explorer 5, you must make sure that the Mac file type is 'svg ' ("svg" followed by a space), or else Internet Explorer 5 will try to parse the SVG file itself instead of passing the file to the Adobe SVG Viewer (and Internet Explorer 5 does not know how to display SVG files).

Netscape

• When you leave a Web page, Netscape can often unload the Adobe SVG Viewer plug-in before Netscape terminates all scripts running in the HTML. Therefore you should be careful when writing scripts to check to see if the plug-in is still loaded before you attempt to access the SVG DOM from setTimeout or setInterval callbacks in your HTML JavaScript.
• Due to design limitations of Netscape, avoid using HTML with the following form:

    <a href="#" onclick="myScriptWhichModifiesSVG()">
  

  The problem is that JavaScript responds to the onclick event and begins executing the script, but then Netscape also responds to the fact that you clicked on a link, and interrupts JavaScript to re-load the current page. This conflict can be avoided by re-writing the code as follows:

    <a href="javascript:myScriptWhichModifiesSVG()">
  

• Due to Netscape script engine limitations, the svgDocument object is not defined in JavaScript functions declared within SVG <script> elements. To work around this, you can retrieve the SVG document object from from withing SVG event handlers by calling getTarget on the evt object which is passed in. For example:

    // Retrieve the SVG document object:
    var directTarget = evt.getTarget();
    var svgDocument;
    if( directTarget.getNodeType() != 9 )  // if not DOCUMENT_NODE
      svgDocument = directTarget.getOwnerDocument();
    else
      svgDocument = directTarget;
  

• Due to a bug in Netscape, if you set your browser cache to 0 bytes, you must click shift-reload in the Netscape toolbar if you want to reload the contents of an SVG graphic that has been modified on the server.
• If a JavaScript event handler contains an error, any subsequent JavaScript will fail to execute. This is due to a bug in Netscape's handling of scripts executed by plug-ins.
• Due to Netscape script limitations, you can't change the URL of another frame from an SVG event handler.
• Due to Netscape script engine limitations, calling the alert() function from within an SVG event handler might not work, and it might cause subsequent JavaScript to no longer execute. Similar problems occur for any Netscape modal window, including the security privileges window.
• There is a bug in Netscape involving plug-ins that use JavaScript. If you load a page with a plug-in that uses JavaScript and then disable Java and quit the browser, Netscape will crash.
• Netscape does not always allow you to access the document.embeds[] array from within an SVG script. To work around this, use document.mySVG, where mySVG is the name of your embed object.
• Currently, you must increase your Netscape memory partition to at least 35 MB to be able to print SVG.
• There is a bug in the Netscape plug-in API involving frames. To work around it, do not use the <a href="some.svg" target="some-frame"> format to display SVG content in another frame which is already displaying SVG. Instead, use the "setSrc(url)" method of the SVG Plugin in the target frame.
• If you try to view multiple SVG files at once, you may run into Netscape memory limitations, resulting in a failure to load the SVG file. In this case, you can increase Netscape's memory partition to allow you to view more SVG files at once.
• Netscape has a fatal bug in its code for handling full-page printing of plug-ins on the Mac. We have implemented a temporary work-around which does not yet allow you to cancel full-page SVG printing on the Mac--in this case the system will be unresponsive until the page has printed.
• Netscape 4.05 for the Mac has a bug in the plug-in API such that it will not load some plug-ins, falsely indicating that there is insufficient memory.
• Netscape has a bug with the way it handles plug-ins in tables, and the bug becomes more obvious the deeper you nest the tables. Netscape tells the plug-in to draw on the wrong part of the page, and there's no way for the plug-in to know that it's the wrong part. Therefore we recommend that you avoid using tables with the Adobe SVG Viewer on the Mac.
• All Netscape 4.x versions on the Mac have a bug involving printing pages that contain embedded plugins. If you print a Web page from one of these browsers and then hit the "back", "home", and "back" buttons several times, Netscape will eventually crash. If you wait about ten seconds after printing, Netcape is sometimes able to recover and avoid the crash.
• Due to a bug in the way Netscape handles plug-ins and frames, if you have a frameset which has a frame that links to a plug-in which displays full-page in the same frame, Netscape will crash if you follow the link, click the back button, and then follow a link to another full-page plug-in which displays in that same frame.
• Netscape on the Mac reloads pages in frames when you resize the window. Because of this, any SVG DOM object that JavaScript holds on to will point to an old version of the document once the window is re-sized. To work around this problem, do not cache SVG DOM objects in JavaScript variables between event handler, setTimeout, or setInterval calls.

Contact Information

To report bugs and/or provide feedback, please go to the SVG Web Center on Adobe.com.

Copyright Notice

© Copyright 1998-2000 by Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Adobe and Illustrator are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS and TrueType are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.