SVG is a platform for two-dimensional graphics. It has two parts: an XML-based file format and a programming API for graphical applications. Just to enumerate some of the key features: shapes, text and embedded raster graphics with many painting styles, scripting through languages such as ECMAScript and support for animation.
SVG is a vendor-neutral open standard that has important industry support. Companies like Adobe, Apple, IBM and others have contributed to the W3C specification. Many documentation frameworks, including DocBook have support for SVG by means of defining the graphics directly in the document.
<oXygen/> adds SVG support by using the Batik package, an open source project developed by the Apache Software foundation. The SVG DTD is solved by the default XML catalog.
<oXygen/> can render SVG by two means:
You may use it to browse and open any SVG file.
This panel can render the result of an XSLT transformation that generates SVG documents.
The basic use-case of <oXygen/> consists in the development of the XSLT stylesheets capable of producing rich SVG graphics. For example when you have an XML document describing the evolution of a parameter over time and you need to create a graphic from it, you can start with a static SVG, written directly in <oXygen/> or exported from a graphics tool like the Adobe suite. Extract then the parts that are dependent of the data from the XML document and create the XSLT templates.