incorrect size when exporting svg file

[stuart hibberd]

When I export my image as an SVG file the output size is too small.

I draw a 10 x 10 cm box and I can see from the SVG file that it is exported as 283.46 pixel rather than 377.95 pixel.

How can I correct this?

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

10 cm is converted to 283 pixels at 72 ppi, which is Illustrator's default resolution for this.

[stuart hibberd]

Hi Monika.

Many thanks for this. Do you know what resolution I would need to set to get the correct pixel count please?

The reason this is important is that I import the file into another program which controls a water jet cutter so I need 10cmm on the screen to convert to 10cm on the water jet . Thanks 

[Monika Gause]

If youcan't set it up when importing in the other app then you could try and edit the SVG code in a text editor. Or set up your artboard in Illustrator in the desired pixel size.

[Jacob Bugge · Accepted solution]

Stuart,

The 377.95 px corresponds to 10 cm at 96 PPI, so you can increase the artwork size by dividing the W value by 0.75 and press Ctrl/Cmd+Enter and set your Artboard to 13.3333 x 13.3333 cm.

[N J A]

The correct answer is that Adobe has known about this issue for several years, but does nothing to make Illustrator compatible with the modern world, or the CSS/SVG standard of 96 ppi. A long post to which I and many others contributed on this topic seems to have disappeared! All that is needed is a switch on the SVG output dialog to select 72 or 96 ppi, and then use that to scale the header dimensions as they are written into the output SVG. Evidently, this is beyond the capabilities of Adobe developers despite many, many, customers complaining about this very issue. Anyway, the only solution is to:

1) Use Inkscape and forget Illustrator. Inkscape is a native SVG editor that works and correctly uses 96 ppi.

2) If you must use Illustrator, then unfortunately you are forced to scale all your artwork by 1.333x  (96/72) every time before saving as SVG, which is both time-consuming and annoying even if you have written a script to do all the necessary actions.

[Monika Gause]

Please post bugs & feature requests to http://illustrator.uservoice.com

That's the please where you reach the developers.

[N J A]

This was already raised in: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/312... (the thread I was looking for) in January 2018 - three and a half years ago! It is tagged as STARTED, so please can you confirm that developers at Adobe are actively attending to this fundamental issue at the moment?

[Monika Gause]

This is a user forum.

95% of people cannot confirm anything. We aren't even staff. That's why it's so fruitless to even post feature requests here.