Graphical Objects

As a graphics standard, SVG allows for three types of graphic objects:

• Vector graphic shapes (lines, polylines, rectangles, circles, ellipses, polygons)
• Raster images (also called bitmapped images)
• Text

SVG uses specific tags to define basic vector graphics objects such as <rect>, <circle>, <ellipse>, <polyline>, <polygon> and so on. Complex graphics that cannot be described by the basic shapes are defined as <path>. There are two kinds of SVG’s Path - lines and curves.

These shapes are can be filled with paint and stroked. Each fill and stroke operation has adjustable opacity settings. The types of supported paint are solid colors, linear and radial gradients and patterns.

Graphical objects can be styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects and template objects.

It is possible to embed raster images in SVG. SVG use the <image> element to embed a bitmap image like PNG or JPEG similar to the way in HTML. Raster graphics in SVG can be scaled, transformed, and filtered.

SVG has powerful text capabilities. It has the following text features:

• font specification,
• text orientation and direction,
• text alignment and,
• rich text formatting
  

In SVG, text in the graphics can be indexed by search engines, so text is searchable and selectable within a browser by a user.