svglover

A pure lua library to import and display simple SVGs in LÖVE.

Tested up to love-11.3 (Mysterious Mysteries).

Note that because it is specifically written for LÖVE, it is probably not useful for other Lua environments.

If you really want to squash your SVGs, try running them through SVGO and/or gzipping them.

The latest code can always be found at Github.

Alternative SVG libraries

lvg is a relatively simple SVG renderer (in pure lua, like svglover)
tove2d a non pure lua love2d library for SVG support which includes multiple renderers and animation features, based on the unmaintained nanosvg C library

News

2019-03-26: v1.1.1 released!
- Fix typo
2019-03-19: v1.1.0 released! Major work from @nasso, thanks!
- Add support for the following elements: <path>, <use> and <polyline>.
- Add support for the following attributes: href, xlink:href, d, viewBox, (stroke|fill)-opacity.
- Add support for many more color formats.
- Improved support for the transform attribute.
- Improved support for opacity-related attributes.
- Various XML parsing improvements.
- Removed tableshow.lua - I don't know why it was there but I'm pretty sure it isn't needed for svglover to work since it wasn't used at all.
- Changed the demo code to show all the new features.
- Some bug fixes.
2017-05-30: v1.0.5 released!
- Normalize internal function naming / reduce potential namespace collision issues
2016-10-02: v1.0.4 released!
- Fix compatibility issue by moving from basic Lua IO functions to 100% Love filesystem functions
2016-10-02: v1.0.3 released!
- Allow automatic / transparent loading of gzip compressed SVG files
- Add zoom feature
2016-10-02: v1.0.2 released!
- Fix Lua logic error that was stopping fill-related scaling from working properly
2016-09-27: v1.0.1 released!
- Add <circle> support (when circles are not drawn as <ellipse>)
- Slightly hardier parsing
- Improved documentation
2016-09-27: v1.0.0 released!
- Basic functionality

Features

Supports the following elements:
- <circle>
- <ellipse>
- <g>
- <path> (no support for ArcTo yet)
- <polygon>
- <polyline>
- <rect>
- <use>
Supports the following attributes:
- id, href, xlink:href, x, y, width, height, cx, cy, r, rx, ry, d, points
- transform (with support for translate, rotate, scale, skewX, skewY and matrix)
- viewBox
- stroke
- stroke-opacity
- stroke-width
- fill
- fill-opacity
- opacity
Supports the following color syntaxes:
- #1e90ff
- #621
- dodgerblue (or any other valid CSS color name)
- rgb(12%, 56%, 100%)
- rgb(30, 144, 255)
- rgba(12%, 56%, 100%, 0.5)
- rgba(30, 144, 255, 0.5)

Why?

SVGs are scalable, which is useful in today's era of vastly differing device screen resolutions
SVGs are small
Vector images look cool
With a little more coding you can probably animate their bits

Usage

First import the library with require

svglover = require('svglover')

You should normally load your SVGs straight away in the love.load() function to prevent duplicate reads. The syntax for doing this is as follows:

vector_image = svglover.load('some.svg')

You then specify where you want them displayed using:

svglover.display(vector_image,topleft_x,topleft_y,width,height,completely_fill_region,border_color,border_width,zoom)

... where completely_fill_region, border_color, border_width and zoom are optional.

Finally, you should add the svglover.draw() call to the end of your love.draw() function.

A complete example:

function love.load()
    vector_image = svglover.load('some.svg')
    svglover.display(vector_image,100,100,100,100,true,{255,0,0,255},1,1)
end

function love.draw()
    -- draw any scheduled SVGs
    svglover.draw()
end

Development

Feel free to hack, fork, create issues, or send pull requests. It should be possible and not too difficult to add advanced features like text and post-draw handles for dynamic manipuplation of the resulting images to support things like transitions. However, I am personally happy with the existing functionality and will not be adding features in the near future.

Motivation

I wanted to place SVG vector images in a roguelike game I was making, Zomia, but there was no pre-existing library. I first built a proof of concept in perl, svg2love, but then wanted to load files direct from SVG in Lua instead of an intermediate format.

This is my first Lua library, so it probably ignores many best practices.

globalcitizen / svglover