I absolutely love the SVG support in Pixelmator Pro.
These new improvements give great confidence when developing for the web, and the web slice tool has become indispensable to me!
I've even taken a look inside the SVG code and manually modified it. (Shoutout to CotEditor.) The code is super clean! Great job!
Two minor requests though,
- Add an option to vectorize text on export, and add an option to include the font inside the SVG. (Both would be super useful.)
- Add support for SVG symbols, or symbols in general, where a single component can be referenced more than one time in a document.
- Add support for SVG definitions, where things like colors and gradients can be defined once and then referenced.
I manually modified Pixelmator SVG code to include symbols and I had a 50% size reduction in a very repetitive SVG documents. And let's be honest, referencing parts of an SVG inside an SVG is a cool underused feature. (Not even Affinity Designer has this.)
Some other things to think about.
- SVG supports adding hyperlinks.
- SVG can be optimized in different ways. More readable code = bigger. Less readable code = smaller. Could be nice to choose! In fact, one of my Pixelmator SVGs was uploaded to an SVG compressor and it managed a near 70% reduction in file size.
Like Affinity, you should keep improving vector tools inside this raster workflow. And perhaps one day we'll be able to preview vectors in a non-pixel preview mode.
Again, I've been working on a web project recently. It's been to nice to cut the cruft and get a super simple vector workflow with web slicing.
A Comment On SVG Support (And a Minor Request)
2022-03-02 13:28:56
2022-03-16 15:13:27
Hey there! Great suggestions, we definitely agree these would be nice to have. We have other features in mind as a priority for now, but we'll be sure to keep these in mind for the future!
2024-04-02 03:47:18
+1 bump to Zenith22's request.
I just exported a design to SVG, but the text portions are totally wrong because the SVG file didn't preserve the font. So now, this design is unfortunately totally useless, and I have to move to another app to redesign it. Otherwise, the SVG engine was sooo close to being solid. I'd almost argue that if fonts aren't preserved, then the SVG export option was prematurely released- I'm not trying to be negative, I'm saying that a core requirement of SVG export is text appearing correctly. Otherwise, others and I will probably just entirely skip Pixelmator for designs that require SVG export (which would be a bummer because I really love this app). Yes Pixelmator isn't primarily/originally a vector-based app, but if there's going to be some SVG support, at least support one of the most basic functions. Pretty please.
For anyone dealing with the same issue, one workaround is to convert everything to shapes. It worked for me, although created a HUGE SVG file, but at least it's something. So incidentally, Pixelmator already has the functionality to address Zenith22's first request, ie the Pixelmator team could just add a stage of "convert to shapes" when exporting to SVG (and hopefully figure out how to get the file size back down to Earth). Maybe there are better ways of doing it, but at least that's a bandaid solution for now, vs relegating this to a forgotten area of the feature request pile.
I just exported a design to SVG, but the text portions are totally wrong because the SVG file didn't preserve the font. So now, this design is unfortunately totally useless, and I have to move to another app to redesign it. Otherwise, the SVG engine was sooo close to being solid. I'd almost argue that if fonts aren't preserved, then the SVG export option was prematurely released- I'm not trying to be negative, I'm saying that a core requirement of SVG export is text appearing correctly. Otherwise, others and I will probably just entirely skip Pixelmator for designs that require SVG export (which would be a bummer because I really love this app). Yes Pixelmator isn't primarily/originally a vector-based app, but if there's going to be some SVG support, at least support one of the most basic functions. Pretty please.
For anyone dealing with the same issue, one workaround is to convert everything to shapes. It worked for me, although created a HUGE SVG file, but at least it's something. So incidentally, Pixelmator already has the functionality to address Zenith22's first request, ie the Pixelmator team could just add a stage of "convert to shapes" when exporting to SVG (and hopefully figure out how to get the file size back down to Earth). Maybe there are better ways of doing it, but at least that's a bandaid solution for now, vs relegating this to a forgotten area of the feature request pile.