Scalable Vector Graphics
This website uses the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format when displaying graphs. This is a new standard for web graphics being promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium.
SVG is an open standard which has been designed with accessibility in mind, and which has garnered support from the likes of Adobe, Macromedia and others.
Browser Support
Most browsers on the market don't support the SVG
format by default. For Windows and Macintosh users, we recommend you download and
install the Adobe
SVG Viewer
![[External Link]](/images/external.gif)
.
This will provide SVG support in
Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.
Note: Adobe has started bundling the SVG viewer with the latest versions of Adobe Reader
For users of Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape things are a bit more complicated. Some releases of these browsers have support for SVG built-in, but others don't. Quite often they won't recognise the presence of the Adobe SVG plugin.
If you have one of these browsers and it doesn't support
the SVG format, you will need to
download and install
version 6.0 preview 1
of Adobe's Viewer software. When the software is installed go to the folder
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins and copy the
files NPSVG6.dll and NPSVG6.zip to the plugins folder of your browser
(e.g. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins). When you restart the browser the
plugins will be recognised and activated.
If you use the Opera browser, you will need to do something similar. Download the stable
release of the Adobe
SVG Viewer
and from the
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer\Plugins folder copy the files
NPSVG3.dll and NPSVG3.zip into the Opera plugins folder (e.g.
C:\Program Files\Opera\Program\Plugins.
It should be noted that you can download for free a version of the Mozilla Browser
(on which Netscape is based) with
SVG support built-in
.
Downloads are available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Support for
SVG on Unix-style operating
systems also exists in the form of the
Konqueror
browser which supports SVG since
version 3.2 using the KSVG
KPart.
Copying SVG Graphics into Microsoft Word
There are two important points to remember when copying SVG images into Microsoft Word. The first is that the images are copied at the scale at which they are being viewed. If you increase the size of the browser window the images will scale up accordingly. You'll want to copy the images at the largest scale you can to get a good reproduction when you print. Once scaled, right-click on any part of the image and select Copy SVG to copy it to the clipboard.
The second point is that when pasting images into Word you have to select Paste Special and in the dialog that appears select the bitmap format. If you just click Paste normally the textual source code will be pasted into Word instead of the image it represents.
Printing SVG Graphics
There is a known issue with printing SVG
images. In short, the Adobe
SVG Viewer
will only print
a single page. By default this means it will print one page of the graphics at the view
you've selected and omit the rest.
There are two workarounds. The first is to right-click on the SVG image and select the View SVG option. This will open the image in a new browser window on it's own. If you print from here the entire image will be scaled down to fit the paper size. This means all graphs will be printed, but quite possibly at too small a scale.
The second is to copy and paste the SVG image into a graphics program, and print it from there.