Librsvg


librsvg is a free software SVG rendering library written as part of the GNOME project, intended to be lightweight and portable. The Linux command-line program rsvg uses the library to turn SVG files into raster images.

Backends

librsvg uses two other libraries to perform tasks from reading the file to rendering to the screen:
Since v2.41.0 many parts have been rewritten in Rust.

Adoption

librsvg is developed for the GNOME desktop environment and as such is used by GNOME Files but is also intended to be used in other software applications. As a notable example, wikis hosted by Wikimedia use librsvg to render SVG images. It was once picked for these web applications because it was decidedly "fast but not very accurate", according to MediaWiki.
Upon switching to the cairo vector rendering engine in 2005, librsvg became more accurate and more visually pleasing. Since 2012 an independent developer published Win32 console ports rsvg-convert.exe, as of 2016 version 2.40.13. The rsvg-view manual page is also available online.

Usage

On Linux, an SVG file can be converted to PNG as follows:

$ rsvg-convert --format=png --output=diagram.png diagram.svg

Other supported output formats include PDF, XML, and valid SVG.