I’m pleased to announced a new package for producing SVG s from R: svglite . This package is a fork of Matthieu Decorde RSvgDevice and wouldn’t be possible without his hard work. I’d also like to thank David Gohel who wrote the gdtools package: it solves all the hardest problems associated with making good SVGs from R.

Today, most browsers have good support for SVG and it is a great way of displaying vector graphics on the web. Unfortunately, R’s built-in svg() device is focussed on high quality rendering, not size or speed. It renders text as individual polygons: this ensures a graphic will look exactly the same regardless of what fonts you have installed, but makes output considerably larger (and harder to edit in other tools). svglite produces hand-optimised SVG that is as small as possible.

Features#

svglite is a complete graphics device: that means you can give it any graphic and it will look the same as the equivalent .pdf or .png. Please file an issue if you discover a plot that doesn’t look right.

Use#

In an interactive session, you use it like any other R graphics device:

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svglite::svglite("myfile.svg")
plot(runif(10), runif(10))
dev.off()

If you want to use it in knitr, just set your chunk options as follows:

```r setup, include = FALSE
library(svglite)
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  dev = "svglite",
  fig.ext = ".svg"
)

(Thanks to Bob Rudis for the tip )

There are also a few helper functions:

  • htmlSVG() makes it easy to preview the SVG in RStudio.

  • editSVG() opens the SVG file in your default SVG editor.

  • xmlSVG() returns the SVG as an xml2 object.