We use FrameMaker for desktop publishing of traditional tech manuals. We have recently begun transitioning to SVG for illustrations, as we often develop web applications (interactive electronic tech manuals) in parallel, and SVG is fully supported by modern web browsers. Unfortunately, we've had several issues with SVG in FrameMaker:
- Inserted SVG images lose styles if SVG <style> node does not include type="text/css" attribute. According to the W3C spec, the default is "text/css", hence this is extraneous, and therefore some applications omit it.
- Other applications with SVG support do not seem to have this limitation.
- We are working around this issue by adding the type attribute to the <style> node prior to insertion in FrameMaker.
- FrameMaker requests DPI settings when inserting an SVG. We find this peculiar, since SVG is a vector format. Our best guess is that some sort of calculation is taking place between width, height, and viewbox attributes.
- We have yet to determine the impact of the selected DPI setting on insert, although we suspect it may be contributing to the following issue:
- Inserted SVG images come in with ridiculous scaling. Despite SVG width and height attributes being defined in inches, FrameMaker seems to completely disregard these attributes, and instead calculates its own arbitrary (and often absurdly large) dimensions. Our publishers are then forced to manually scale each image, despite the fact that the desired dimensions were already set. We do not have this issue when inserting WMF images.
- When inserting hundreds of images in a document, this is costing a considerable amount of time.
- We currently do not have an acceptable work-around for this issue.
So now to our questions:
- Is there something our publishers need to change with their workflow to prevent the DPI dialog from appearing when inserting an SVG?
- Is there something our artists can change in the SVG files for FrameMaker to respect the defined width and height attributes?
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