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SVG embedding in XHTML with TextPattern · 2010-02-10 19:20 by Black in

To store and transport scale independent graphics SVG is a standardised format. It is supported by most browsers somewhat, with the exception of Microsoft’s product. It would be nice if it could be used like the usual raster image formats in an <img /> tag. While Safari and other WebKit browsers support this usage, Firefox does not. Instead, SVG can be embedded directly into the source code of an XHTML file.

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The above image is part of the source code of this page. It is included by a TextPattern plugin, and only slightly processed. Processing is needed to remove the <?xml /> header and to insert a viewBox attribute to allow scaling of the image with CSS. With that done, Firefox displays and scales the image nicely. Safari on the other hand causes trouble, it does not correctly infer the viewport height from the width and the aspect ratio.

To be allowed to embed SVG data, the mime type of the document has to be application/xhtml+xml or similar. This has to be changed for TextPattern by editing the header() call in publish.php. The plugin code itself is rather simple. Download a version ready to be pasted into TextPattern (Licensed under the MIT). Below the sourcecode.

svg_inline.php [1.74 kB]

  1. function svg_inline($atts)
  2. {
  3.   extract(lAtts(array(
  4.     'src'  => '',
  5.   ),$atts));
  6.  
  7.   if ($src)
  8.   {
  9.     if ($src[0] == '/')
  10.     {
  11.       // Relative to Document Root
  12.       $src = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$src;
  13.     }
  14.     $svg = file_get_contents($src, FILE_TEXT);
  15.     if ($svg)
  16.     {
  17.       // Add this to publish.php
  18.       //header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
  19.       $svg = preg_replace('/<\?xml [^>]*>/', '', $svg, 1);
  20.       $svg = preg_replace('/(<svg[^>]*)width="([^"]*)"([^>]*)height="([^"]*)"([^>]*)>/',
  21.         '$1$3$5 viewBox="0 0 $2 $4">', $svg, 1);
  22.       return '<div class="svg">'.$svg.'</div>';
  23.     }
  24.     else
  25.     {
  26.       return 'Read error src='.$src;
  27.     }
  28.   }
  29.   else
  30.   {
  31.     return 'Missing src';
  32.   }
  33. }

TextPattern plugins are php functions that take two arguments: an array containing the tag attributes, and the contents of the tag element. All this plugin function does is to read the specified svg file and return the filtered source. A simple <txp:svg_inline src="imagepath" /> results in a nicely embedded SVG.

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