svg-buddy: SVG Font Embedding and Optimization

Command line tool to embed fonts into an SVG file. This way, you can ensure an aligned presentation of your SVG independent of the fonts that are installed on the user's system. It also supports optimization to reduce the file size.

Features

There are already other good CLI tools like svg-embed-font or nano for embedding fonts into SVGs. Nevertheless, I created svg-buddy because I believe it uniquely combines the following features at the same time:

• It automatically downloads the required fonts. Only Google Fonts are supported. The fonts are cached locally to avoid downloading them again and again. Moreover, it embeds WOFF2 fonts which are compressed and therefore much smaller (up to the factor 10 compared to TTF).
• The embedding should always work. See Reliable Embedding for details.
• It can optimize the SVG to reduce the file size. See Optimizations for details.
  • The optimization is compatible with Diagrams.net/Draw.io's SVGs. No text will be cut off with an ellipsis and no warning about the SVG support will be shown.
• It's free.
• It works offline.

Reliable Embedding

The font embedding should always work as svg-buddy relies on a properly parsed DOM instead of string replacement in the SVG. So it doesn't matter how the <def> tag exactly looks like (normal, empty, missing, with whitespace between the attributes). This is also ensured with several tests using real-world SVGs from different editors like:

• Inkscape
• Draw.io/Diagrams.net
• yEd

Optimizations

Currently, svg-buddy only supports simple optimizations.

• Remove the meta data that some editors write in the svg (like Inkscape's metadata tag or Draw.io's content attribute).
• Remove all tags, attributes and namespace declarations that don't belong to the SVG namespace. The only exceptions are the namespaces for xhtml and xlink since Draw.io uses them for content that can't be removed.
• Most editors heavily generate inline CSS in style attributes. Usually they contain the same large values again and again. svg-buddy removes these redundant style values and replace them with reusable CSS rules in the head. These rules get referenced via the class attribute.
• Remove empty g tags. Adobe Illustrator creates those at the end of an SVG.
• Remove comments.
• Remove all whitespaces like spaces, tabs and line breaks.

Font Source

svg-buddy downloads the fonts not directly from Google Fonts but from google-webfonts-helper which is a wrapper around Google Fonts providing a better API.

System Requirements and Installation

Go to releases. There are two files available.

• Linux users can use the native executable svg-buddy.
• Windows and Mac users need a Java 11 Runtime (JRE) on their system. Next, they can use the svg-buddy.jar to execute the tool via the java command.

Usage

Usage: svg-buddy INPUT [OUTPUT] [--optimize]
If the OUTPUT path is not submitted a new file is created with the postfix '-e' in the same directory as the INPUT file. If --optimize is set the postfix '-eo' is used.
usage: gnu
 -o,--optimize   If set, simple optimizations are applied to the output
                 SVG to reduce the file size.

Examples:

# embed font into file.svg and save it under file-e.svg
svg-buddy file.svg # Linux
java -jar svg-buddy.jar file.svg # Windows & Mac

# embed font into file.svg, optimize the file size and save it under file-eo.svg
svg-buddy file.svg -o # Linux
java -jar svg-buddy.jar file.svg -o # Windows & Mac

# embed font into file.svg and save it under output.svg
svg-buddy file.svg output.svg # Linux
java -jar svg-buddy.jar file.svg output.svg # Windows & Mac

Development

Running the application in dev mode

./mvnw quarkus:dev

Run the Tests

Execute them directly via IntelliJ IDEA or Maven using ./mvnw test

Build

Build the native Linux executable:

# Build
./mvnw package -Pnative -Dquarkus.native.container-build=true

# Execute
./target/svg-buddy-runner input.svg

Build the fat jar which can be executed via Java on every system (Mac, Windows):

# Build
./mvnw package -Dquarkus.package.uber-jar=true

# Execute
java -jar target/svg-buddy-runner.jar input.svg