Validity of Illustrator SVG output

[Kevin_Trainor@adobeforums.com]

I am in the process of evaluating Illustrator CS as an authoring tool for SVG documents that are destined for both print and web output. I am having good success at saving documents as type SVG and subsequently rendering them using my browser and XSL-FO engine. My concern is that when I validate one of these SVG files generated by Illustrator CS using the validating parser in XLMSPY, the tool says that the XML is invalid and it complains about the markup that Illustrator has placed inside the metadata tags. While I realize that this stuff in the metadata tags is there to allow Illustrator to roundtrip these SVG files, it worries me that they appear to not conform to the SVG 1.0 DTD that is referenced in the DOCTYPE declaration.

Has anyone else discovered this phenomenon? Does it concern you? Is this a problem that will go away with a later version of the standard DTD? Is it possible that this is just the result of a coding error in the Illustrator SVG output?

Before I adopt this set of tools into my workflow, I want to make sure that I am not stepping on shakey ground.

I would appreciate advice on this subject.

Thanks.

Kevin

[CharlesS]

I have the same problem exactly.
The ONLY solution I have found is to remove SOME of the first few lines of the svg and then the xml loader will parse it.
I would love a cleaner solution!

[Kevin_Trainor@adobeforums.com]

Do people from Adobe monitor this forum? If so, I would appreciate a comment on this subject.

Kevin

[BobHill@adobeforums.com]

Kevin,

This is a USER TO USER forum. Adobe employees do pop in from time to time, but do so as interested USERS and not as part of their job descriptions. If you feel something should be changed or added to an Adobe program go to <http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html>. This is the best way to communicate it, other than the Feature Request Topic at the top of the Forum list of Topics.

Bob

[Kevin_Trainor@adobeforums.com]

Bob:

Is there any official adobe support mechanism where I can get my questions on SVG answered without paying? I think that is what I am searching for.

Thanks.

Kevin

[BobHill@adobeforums.com]

Kevin,

Perhaps one of the Adobe people that pop in here from time to time can answer this for you, but if it's an "official" Adobe Tech support situation, no, I know of none without a fee except for here.

Bob

[Paul_A_George@adobeforums.com]

As far as I know you're not treading on shaky ground. I believe the XML Illustrator produces is valid and that a DTD could be produced such that it would validate succesfully. However, I'm not an XML expert. Since your question is about XML you might try asking it on an XML forum. Perhaps there's a Google group that could help out.

[Sara_Kubik@adobeforums.com]

Kevin,
Ask your question in the Yahoo SVG Developers Group (highly active and responsive).

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/>

Sara Porter

[Jeroen_Dekker@adobeforums.com]

It seems that Adobe intentionally puts in a lot of largely unnecessary metadata in Illustrator's SVG output. It may cause the SVG not to work well with non-Adobe XML applications, it may not be valid SVG. I can't judge this on technical merit, because I'm not a programmer, but I've heard others complain about this before.

There seems to be a similarity with Illustrator EPS, which often caused problems with PostScript parsers other than Adobe's. One could be inclined to think that Adobe does this to ensure that you use Adobe products for every part of your workflow.

Some companies instead incorporate our graphics conversion software into their workflow. It takes EPS and PDF as input (so you can choose whatever authoring app you prefer), and batch converts it to SVG. The SVG generally behaves well in SVG Viewers, XSL-FO engines and other XML implementations. If not, it can easily be fine-tuned to do so. See URL below for details, sample file conversion or trial installation.

Jeroen Dekker
--
Square One - The Graphics Connection
Visit <http://www.square.1.nl/index.htm>
[email]jeroen@square1.nl[/email]