SVG Mask is pixelated on retina displays - svg

I have a simple cut-out rectangle with text in the middle.
<svg>
<defs>
<mask id="mytext">
<rect width='100%' height='100%' fill='white'/>
<text>Welcome</text>
</mask>
</defs>
<rect width='100%' height='100%' fill='blue' mask="url(#mytext)"/>
</svg>
However when viewing from a retina display the text edges become pixelated.
It does't happen if I only use text without masking it, but as soon the mask is used it breaks everything out.
EDIT: By Retina Display I mean, iOS and OSX both latest versions. All Browsers. I believe it might be a pixel density issue.
The interesting is while having
<text fill='url(#mypattern)'>Welcome</text>
The text is rendered sharply perfect. The problem lies only with masks being applied.
Here it is a jsfiddle sample (please make sure to test on your retina display enabled device).
And here is a screenshot displaying the difference on iPhone (note that the edges of the text below and how pixelated it looks).

Related

Space between SVG stroke and fill

Filling and stroking a circle with the same color and a stroke-width exceeding a certain size, produces a strange transparent region “between” the two paint regions. What is going on?
This is happening in both Chrome and Firefox, so it may be to spec, but I couldn’t find any language in the spec about this behavior.
Fiddle
<svg viewBox="0 0 300 300">
<circle cx="100" cy="100" r="8"
stroke="#000" stroke-width="40"
fill="#000"/>
</svg>
Produces this rendering:
As Robert Longson noted, the issue shows up when a stroke overlaps itself in such a way that it creates a donut-hole when you convert the stroke outline to a separate path (depending on the winding-order / fill-rule calculations).
The gap between the fill and stroke in your particular example is caused by the "inside" edge of the stroke extending across the entire fill region and out the other side.
It gets really weird when you have dashed strokes, as shown in the examples from Tavmjong Bah's discussion article.
This is, unfortunately, neither according to the SVG spec nor against the spec. Instead, the spec at this point of time has left the matter undefined.
SVG working group discussion is here.
At this point, WebKit, Blink, and Firefox on Mac/Android draw strokes with cut-outs, using the Skia graphics library or Apple's CoreGraphics.
IE/Edge and Firefox on Windows/Linux just draw the total stroke, without cut-outs, as do Inkscape and Illustrator and most PDF-rendering software (the PDF spec itself is non-committal).
Everyone I've discussed this with agrees that the cut-outs are a sub-optimal result. But with so many browsers using rendering engines that do it this way, the SVG working group wasn't willing to make the more-intuitive stroke behavior a strict requirement. So instead, the SVG 2 spec has a warning-to-authors with a sample figure:
At this point, the best prospect for making a change would be to file issues (or contribute code) on the Skia library. If it was changed, that puts pressure on Apple to update to match, and the SVG spec would be able to make it official.
I found that adding stroke-linecap="round" style="stroke-dasharray: 1000" fixes the issue by introducing virtual dashes
<svg viewBox="0 0 300 300">
<circle cx="100" cy="100" r="8"
stroke="#000" stroke-width="40"
fill="#0F0" stroke-linecap="round" style="stroke-dasharray: 1000" />
</svg>
It's an artifact because the stroke width is so big it crosses the centre of the circle. It shouldn't happen but it's easily avoided by increasing r and decreasing the stroke-width.

What's the difference in accessibility between having SVG inline or as an image?

I am developing a web page trying to focus on accessibility, and created different graphics in SVG to go in it. After reading different sites online (1, 2, and 3), I included the <title> and <desc> tags, and added the attributes role and aria-labelledby to make the SVGs more accessible.
Some of those sources, seem to claim (directly or indirectly) that using SVG inline is better for accessibility; so I ran a few tests with NVDA to see the differences, but I fail to see any at first sight.
For example, using a simple SVG:
<svg width="100" height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100" role="img" aria-labelledby="title desc">
<title id="title">Abstract Forms</title>
<desc id="desc">Red square containing a white circle containing a blue triangle pointing up.</desc>
<g stroke="none" stroke-width="0">
<rect x="0" y="0" width="100" height="100" fill="red" />
<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" fill="white" />
<path d="M 50,20 80,70 20,70 Z" fill="blue" />
</g>
</svg>
If I add it to the page like that, NVDA reads "Graphic. Abstract Forms. Red square containing a white circle containing a blue triangle pointing up."
And if I save it into a myImg.svg file, and add it to the page like this:
<img src="myImg.svg" alt="Red square containing a white circle containing a blue triangle pointing up" title="Abstract Forms" />
NVDA then reads "Graphic. Red square containing a white circle containing a blue triangle pointing up." (same thing as before, just not reading the title).
This may be an NVDA thing, and other screen readers may do it differently, but there doesn't seem to be any considerable difference between the two. At least not to claim that inlining the SVG is better for accessibility.
Then I thought it could be related to reading additional information; for example, if there was some text within the graphic. So I added a <text x="50" y="50" fill="black">Hello World</text> at the end of the SVG... but NVDA read the same thing as before; not even selecting the text it will read it (again I don't know if this is an NVDA thing and if other screen readers do it differently).
So my questions are: what are the differences between having SVG inline or as an image? And what are the benefits (for accessibility) of having the SVG inline?
You probably already self-answered your question.
Inline-svg is interpreted as part of the html webpage. So your svg title and description are interpreted as well and read by the screen reader.
When using an ‘img‘ tag to include the svg, the file is handled like an external file (like a jpg) and so only the ‘alt‘ attribute of the img tag (= the image description) is interpreted/read by the screen reader.
I have currently no source and can't test it a the moment, but I think there are also differences for links within the svg code: Links within inline svg are read by the screenreader, links within external svg files not.

SVG mask doesn't work if a media query is present

TL;DR: I need to mask out a portion of one rectangle in SVG, based on the size and position of another existing rectangle, which will be changing dynamically. A Chrome bug is blocking the mask + use approach I tried. How can I do a mask or inverted clip path based on an existing shape?
Full Overview:
I'm using D3.js, and I am using the brush control to add a brush to a rectangle in an embedded SVG. By default, this adds some extra elements to the SVG, including a rect with class extent that shows the size of the brushed area.
Rather than have the brush extent be rendered as a semi-transparent overlay on top of the rectangle, as in most D3 examples, I am trying to "cut out" the extent from a semi-transparent overlay, so that the brush area shows the true color below. Per this question, I am trying to do this with a mask element, with a child use element referencing the extent. With some D3 magic, I now have a structure like this:
<svg width="100" height="100">
<g class="brush-layer inverted">
<defs>
<mask id="mask835">
<rect fill="#fff" width="100%" height="100%"></rect>
<use fill="#000" xlink:href="#extent848"></use>
</mask>
</defs>
<g class="brush" style="pointer-events: none;">
<rect class="overlay" mask="url(#mask835)" width="100%" height="17"></rect>
<rect class="extent" x="30" width="52" height="17" id="extent848"></rect>
</g>
</g>
</svg>
This works great... sort of. It turns out that there appears to be a tricky Chrome bug, which I've filed here, which prevents the mask from being applied if there's a #media query in the CSS. You can see the working version here and the failing version here (fails in Chrome, works in FF).
I need this to work in Chrome, and can't drop the #media query. I also need to make the use element work, because D3 will automatically resize the extent rectangle, and that's the shape I need to mask out.
So, how can I mask out a portion of one rect, based on another rect, without using the mask + use strategy above?
One possible workaround might be to use a custom clip-path, but it's probably not going to be as elegant. Some examples of how to do do this with clip-path can be found in this question.

Avoid line between tiled SVG shapes

I am using multiple differently colored rectangles to build a SVG data visualization. This works great but sometimes background color bleeds through between the rectangles. I am browsing with Chrome but other browsers seem similarly affected.
http://jsfiddle.net/dVEPk/
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<rect x="10.5" y="10" height="100" width="100"
style="stroke:none; fill: #00cc00"/>
<rect x="110.5" y="10" height="100" width="100"
style="stroke:none; fill: #00cc00"/>
</svg>
In Chrome, if the x offset is an integer, the line is not visible.
I'm sure I can avoid lines by making rectangles a little larger than the space they have to occupy. But this seems like a hack: is there an SVG idiom or best practice to achieve perfectly tiled shapes without "grout"?
I'm also concerned by rendering performance because my visualizations can be very large (say 100MB XML .svg). I'd like to be able to give the renderer hints like "none of the shapes in this <g> are overlapping"?
This is antialiasing at work between the shape and the background. If you want to turn it off set shape-rendering="crispEdges" on the shapes. You can either set that on the rect elements or on the <svg> in which case the rect elements will inherit it.
You may be able to adjust the line's positions by adding 0.5 to the co-ordinates. See the cairo FAQ for more details on this.

Chrome SVG: Reusing animation element with fill="freeze" does not work as expected

I am supporting some old SVG graphics that we have in our application. I am having some issues with animating the fill color of a rectangle, and I am wondering if anyone else has seen the same issue.
We setup an animate element on the rec which ends up looking like this:
<svg id="svgEle" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<rect id="rect"
width="100" height="100"
style="fill:#008000; stroke:#000000;">
<animate id="animate" fill="freeze"
attributeName="fill" attributeType="CSS"
begin="indefinite" dur="1s"></animate>
</rect>
</svg>
And then, depending on values from a webservice result, we change the color of the rect and attempt to animate the color change. Currently it seems as if Chrome is the only native SVG render that supports the beginElement function. The animation works perfect on the first run, but all subsequent attempts to update the animation do not behave as expected. They always seem to revert to the first animation's fill color.
I have created the following example to show what I mean: http://jsfiddle.net/ssawchenko/ARXbs/
In Chrome the rectangle SHOULD cycle through all 4 colors via an animation when you click on the button, but it does not. In IE9 animation is not supported, so the fill color is just changed directly.
I am ok with IE9 simply setting the fill, however, in Chrome the colors are completely busted. Does anyone know if this is a bug, or if there is a work around?
Thanks!
This bug also exhibits in SVG Edit.
<animate attributeName="opacity" begin="indefinite" dur="1" fill="freeze">
</animate>
If you draw rectangles on top of each other you will see they seem semitransparent when they should be fully opaque. I've seen that Chrome Canary doesn't exhibit this behaviour, so it might be fixed in the next release.
I think this filed bug is related.

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