Proposal:Librsvg development funding

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Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Ensure that the underlying project infrastructure is secure, stable, and sufficient to guarantee the permanence of the projects and support ongoing growth.
  5. Encourage Innovation

Summary

librsvg is responsible for rendering scalable vector graphics (SVG) at all Wikimedia projects. It has some long and well known bugs that should be fixed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Proposal

The library librsvg is part of the GNOME project, but not actively maintained. It's sole purpose at the GNOME Desktop is to render SVG-icons. Rendering text is not a main goal for the project, therefore text rendering is not fully implemented.[8]

I therefore propose to pay a developer to improve text-rendering in librsvg.

Motivation

Rendering text is required for educational and encyclopedic scheme graphics. Also many chemical formulas suffer from the problem. A workaround (convert the text to path) is not newbie friendly, requires more disk space and makes it harder to translate the SVG files into other languages.

Key Questions

Potential Costs

unknown

Alternatives

Hello, I support the proposal. Until all bugs are fixed however, I propose to work around this by using a different SVG renderer on Commons, maybe only for those problematic SVGs? Maybe let the uploader decide which engine? One that would work and is OSS: inkview as part of the inkscape package. --85.179.8.41 16:47, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

References

  1. Bug 403274 – text in thumbnail too large. FIXED
  2. Bug 167708 – text on textPath is not rendered at the right place (lands somewhere outside of bounding box).
  3. Bug 574544 – Text coming out wrong size when SVG scaled to funny resolution.
  4. Bug 337979 – text size not rendered correctly.
  5. Bug 460904 – doesn't support text flows.
  6. Bug 612951 - SVG not rendered if header contains width or height in percentage FIXED.
  7. Bug 581494 – rsvg-convert / rsvg can't render a non sized svg graphics FIXED.
  8. Bug 525023 – Text rendered at the wrong position

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Librsvg development funding.

A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 8566.

See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.