librsvg, (occasionally stylized as LibRsvg)[2] is a free softwareSVGrenderinglibrary written as part of the GNOME project, intended to be lightweight and portable.[3] The Linux command-line program rsvg-convert uses the library to turn SVG files into raster images.
Backends
librsvg uses two other libraries to perform tasks from reading the file to rendering to the screen:
libxml is used to parse the XML representation of an SVG file into a form that can be accessed quickly by the library.
cairo is used to render the information obtained by libxml to a block of memory.
Since v2.41.0 many parts have been rewritten in Rust.[4][5]
Adoption
librsvg is developed for the GNOME desktop environment and as such is used by GNOME Files and GNOME Loupe but is also intended to be used in other software applications. As a notable example, wikis hosted by Wikimedia use librsvg to render SVG images.[6] It was once picked for these web applications because it was decidedly "fast but not very accurate", according to MediaWiki.[7] As of May 2023[update], Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons use a version of librsvg 2.44 to render SVG as PNG.[8][9]
Upon switching to the cairo vector rendering engine in 2005,[10][11] librsvg became more accurate and more visually pleasing. Since 2012 an independent developer published Win32 console ports rsvg-convert.exe, as of December 2017[update] version 2.40.20.[12] The rsvg-view manual page is also available online.[13]
Version history
Version
Date
Comments
1.0.0
2001-05-08
1.1.6
2002-03-07
2.0.0
2002-06-19
2.1.0
2002-09-27
2.2.0
2003-01-20
2.3.0
2003-04-08
2.4.0
2003-09-08
2.5.0
2003-12-07
2.6.0
2004-03-08
2.7.0
2004-03-10
2.8.0
2004-09-03
2.9.0
2005-01-25
2.11.0
2005-08-25
2.12.0
2005-09-15
2.13.0
2005-10-21
2.14.0
2006-02-25
2.15.0
2006-05-11
2.16.0
2006-08-31
2.18.0
2007-07-24
2.20.0
2008-01-19
2.22.0
2008-02-21
2.26.0
2009-03-16
2.31.0
2010-07-02
2.32.0
2010-09-27
2.34.0
2011-04-03
2.35.0
2011-11-14
2.36.0
2012-03-26
2.37.0
2013-01-10
2.39.0
2013-08-16
2.40.0
2013-10-14
2.40.16
2016-06-09
2.40.17
2017-04-07
2.40.20
2017-12-16
2.40.21
2020-02-26
2.40.21: Last version without Rust
2.41.0
2017-01-04
2.42.0
2018-01-09
2.43.0
2018-06-12
2.44.0
2018-08-23
2.44.10
2018-12-11
2.45.0
2018-11-17
2.45.6
2019-05-14
2:45.6: First version only on Rust.[clarification needed] Requires Cairo 1.16.0 or later and Rust 1.30.0 or later[14]
2.45.92
2019-09-02
2.46.0
2019-09-09
2.47.0
2019-10-29
2.48.0
2020-03-07
2.48.9
2020-11-05
2.49.0
2020-05-29
2.49.5
2020-09-04
2.50.0
2020-09-10
2.50.3
2021-01-28
Old version, still maintained: 2.50.3: version used on Wikimedia Commons as of May 2023[15]
^Worth, Carl (2 September 2005). "svg shootout". gmane.comp.gnome.lib.librsvg.devel. Retrieved 29 November 2014. the librsvg maintainers … have now added cairo support to librsvg. Many thanks are due to Caleb Moore and Dom Lachowicz for this work. The source can be compiled --with-cairo and it builds separate librsvg-2-cairo.so and librsvg-2-base.so libraries
^Moore, Caleb (3 November 2005). "using librsvg cairo". gmane.comp.gnome.lib.librsvg.devel. Retrieved 29 November 2014. Librsvg-2.13 cannot link to libart since that backend was majorly broken when we released 2.13 and thus must link to cairo.
