pmur002/svglite

A lightweight svg graphics device for R

svglite

svglite is a graphics device that produces clean svg output, suitable for use on the web, or hand editing. Compared to the built-in svg(), svglite produces smaller files, and leaves text as is.

Installation

svglite is available on CRAN using install.packages("svglite"). You can install the development version from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/svglite")

Benchmarks

While the performance of svglite() and svg() is comparable (with a slight upper hand to svglite)

library(svglite)

x <- runif(1e3)
y <- runif(1e3)
tmp1 <- tempfile()
tmp2 <- tempfile()

svglite_test <- function() {
  svglite(tmp1)
  plot(x, y)
  dev.off()
}
svg_test <- function() {
  svg(tmp2, onefile = TRUE)
  plot(x, y)
  dev.off()
}

plot(bench::mark(svglite_test(), svg_test()), type = 'ridge')

It produces considerably smaller files:

file.size(c(tmp1, tmp2)) / 1024
#> [1]  74.54492 321.01172

In both cases, compressing to make .svgz is worthwhile:

gz <- function(in_path, out_path = tempfile()) {
  out <- gzfile(out_path, "w")
  writeLines(readLines(in_path), out)
  close(out)
  
  invisible(out_path)
}
file.size(gz(tmp1)) / 1024
#> [1] 9.416992
file.size(gz(tmp2)) / 1024
#> [1] 38.55762