SVG2: Coordinate Systems

January 10, 2022 (Last Modified: January 19, 2023)

Now that you know what SVG is, here’s a few things will be useful in actually making some pictures.

Remember that when you make the SVG tag, you need the magic parameter that tells the web browser that it really is SVG.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">

If you forget the magic and cryptic xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" the browser says “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”

In that same line, you should also tell thing how big your SVG picture is – the size of the “canvas”. These are the width and height parameters.

If I do this…

1<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
2    <rect x="0" y="0" height="110" width="110" fill="#EEE"> </rect>
3    <rect x="10" y="10" height="40" width="40" fill="blue"></rect>
4    <circle cx="70" cy="90" r="30" fill="red"></circle>
5</svg>

I can draw anywhere – it might even let me draw out of the boundaries (since there aren’t any)

By specifying a width and height for the SVG object, we can put boundaries on the canvas

1<svg height="100px" width="100px" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
2    <rect x="0" y="0" height="110" width="110" fill="#EEE"> </rect>
3    <rect x="10" y="10" height="40" width="40" fill="blue"></rect>
4    <circle cx="70" cy="90" r="30" fill="red"></circle>
5</svg>

Notice that he coordinate system is not changed by the change of size of the canvas. By default, the coordinate system in SVG has (0,0) at the top left, and x and y each be in the default units of the canvas. When you give a size for the canvas, it assumes those are the units you want to use. Here, I specified pixels (that’s why it’s height="100px").

Setting the coordinate system with `viewBox`

SVG allows us to specify a different coordinate system as an attribute of the SVG element. When we create the svg we can specify viewBox as a parameter for the tag. viewBox takes a string with 4 numbers in it. The minimum values for x and y and height and width. So, if we wanted the first picture squished into the boundaries of the second, we could do:

1<svg viewBox="0 0 120 120" height="100px" width="100px" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
2    <rect x="0" y="0" height="110" width="110" fill="#EEE"> </rect>
3    <rect x="10" y="10" height="40" width="40" fill="blue"></rect>
4    <circle cx="70" cy="90" r="30" fill="red"></circle>
5</svg>

Notice that this sets the coordinate system to be between 0 and 120 for x and y, so the whole picture appears within the 100x100 square.

You could have achieved the same effect (getting a convenient coordinate system) by putting computing a transformation that you apply to the group of objects. But, transformations and groups are the next tutorial.

Here is another SVG picture to experiment with using viewBox to change the coordinate system. When you look at svg2-4.svg you will see its a simple picture with 4 circles, of size 100x100.

By changing the viewBox to change the coordinate system, we can show different things. Note that the only thing that changes is the viewBox attribute given to the svg element svg2-4a.svg .

Or even svg2-4b.svg .

Be careful with viewBox: the “B” is capitalized, and things are case sensitive! Also, the second parameters are the width and height (not the upper bounds), and things do not get stretched non-uniformly. If you try to do non-uniform stretch, weird things happen - they are not well explained in the documentation. You can see the official documentation.

A more detailed tutorial on SVG Coordinate systems is the Mozilla SVG Tutorial: Positions.

There are some more other technical things that come up with SVG coordinate systems, these are discussed in the SVG documentation, but are not so important for the class.

Next: SVG3: Manipulating Primivites
Prev: SVG1: Getting Started with SVG

Setting the coordinate system with viewBox

Setting the coordinate system with `viewBox`