Understanding SVG Coordinate Systems & Transformations (Part 1) – The viewport. The viewport is the viewing area where the SVG will be visible. Thanks. Whatever value of the viewBox, it will then be mapped to the computed width of the outer SVG element. All coordinates and lengths in SVG can be specified with or without a unit identifier. Additionally, we’re going to define two axes “max-x” and “max-y”, which will be positioned at + and + , respectively. The viewBox is set to viewBox = "0 0 300 300". The dashed grey lines in the above image represent the mid-x and mid-y axes of the viewport. You specify your own user coordinate system using the viewBox attribute. Thus, in the example above which shows an svg element which has attributes width, height and viewBox, the width and height attributes represent values in the coordinate system that exists before the viewBox transformation is applied. Therefore, when you try to draw a single pixel line at (2, 1), your line will be drawn on half pixels resulting in blurred or anti aliased line. In this case, if the aspect ratio of the viewBox does not match the viewport, some of the viewBox will extend beyond the bounds of the viewport (i.e., the area into which the viewBox will draw is larger than the viewport). share. You will need to handle more complex transforms to support more complex SVG files and implement mouse viewing controls later in the assignment. 3. fina… A new user space (i.e., a new current coordinate system) can also be established by specifying transformations using the transform attribute on a container element or graphics element. If the aspect ratio of the background is not the same as that of the element it is being applied to, parts of the background painting area will not be covered by the background image. The reason for that is that we did not specify it to be otherwise. share. This is the first in a series of three articles covering the topic of coordinate systems and transformations in SVG. Articles on travel, productivity, life, and more. However, you know that the rest of the map is still there, but it's not visible because it extends beyond the boundaries of the viewport—it's being clipped out. Notice how the viewBox is stretched so that it covers the entire viewport. That's strange, the event should give you coordinates local to the target element. This means that we’re preserving the aspect ratio. The viewbox was. The graphic is cropped and scaled up to fill the entire viewport area. It’s the final piece that makes vector graphics Scalable Vector Graphics. Now to get the coordinates of the mouse, related to the pixel x0 of the screen. Say I'm trying to replicate an image and I need the coordinates of certain points to do that, whats the best way to go about this? The best way to understand how the viewport, viewBox, and different preserveAspectRatio values work and interact together is by visualizing them. Select the address from the drop-down list. However, only portions of a web page are visible through the viewport at a time. The thing that makes the clown car technique so cool is that it is powered by SVG. The third axis, z, is initially pointing out of the screen towards the viewer: positive z coordinates are “in front” of the screen, negative z coordinates are behind it. After all, it is the coordinate system used to draw the SVG graphics onto the canvas. The user coordinate system of the SVG canvas is identical to that of the viewport. We’ll start with a simple example. Of course, the best way to understand this is to visualize the result. Adjust the map position as needed. So, meetOrSlice is used to specify whether or not the viewBox will be completely contained inside the viewport, or if it should be scaled as much as needed to cover the entire viewport, even if this means that a part of the viewbox will be “sliced off”. Just ijn case it's not clear, by on-screen pixel coordinates I mean that if I want a line that goes two pixels to the right from the origin (the origin is at the top left" it'd be listed as [0,2]. To make understanding them easier and make them more familiar, you can think of the meetOrSlice value as being similar to the background-size values contain and cover; they work pretty much the same. I've had good success with this in recent Firefox. I’m going to go further and say that you can even crop the SVG graphic using viewBox. Click on Download SVG button. You can also provide a link from the web. let pt = document.querySelector('svg').createSVGPoint(); pt.matrixTransform(shoke.getScreenCTM().inverse()) ["x"] So, at the end, to obtain the precise x point: svg_width - (svg_width + translated) + … In SVG, values can be set with or without a unit identifier. … So, using the align and meetOrSlice values of the preserveAspectRatio attribute, you can specify whether or not to scale the viewBox uniformly, how to align it inside the viewport, and whether or not it should be entirely visible inside the viewport. Since they are both identical at this point, the two coordinate systems overlap. In this case, the boundaries of the `viewBox` are contained inside the viewport such that the boundaries *meet*. Since SVG is a web standard, one option is to use a UIWebView to render the SVG to the iPhone screen, but that option doesn’t work for me. This coordinate system can be smaller or bigger than the viewport, and it can be fully or partially visible inside the viewport too. Spoken interviews about work, freelance career, and beyond. What controls this behavior? THe viewbox is centered inside the viewport both vertically and horizontally. report. After all, it is the coordinate system used to draw the SVG graphics onto the canvas. Conceptually, this canvas is infinite in both dimensions. Whether or not the entire SVG canvas or part of it is visible depends on the size of that canvas* and the value of the preserveAspectRatio attribute. Did that make things more confusing? SVGLocatable.getScreenCTM () gives you an SVGMatrix representing the transformations needed to convert from the viewport coordinates to the local coordinates of your element. It should describe the dimensions of your SVG contents, not your screen.The purpose of viewBox is to tell the browser the dimensions of the graphic content, so it knows how much it needs to scale it to fit the parent container.. Image maps have been around since HTML 3, meaning they have excellent browser support. setZoomRatio(zratio) sets the current map display zoom ratio. It will then be mapped to the viewport coordinate system so that every 1 unit in the user coordinate system is equal to viewport-width / viewBox-width horizontally, and viewport-height / viewBox-height units vertically in the viewport coordinate system. You can subscribe to the RSS (link below) or follow me on Twitter to stay updated. SVG is extremely flexible, and as a result, we are able to leverage it to create an image map-like thing that is actually useful in todays responsive world. If I don't know the coordinate for ViewBox of "SecondSVG" then how can I find out the x coordinate inside the ViewBox of "SecondSVG"? Basically I have an svg "SecondSVG" into an svg "FirstSVG" into an svg "MainSVG".Every svg has its own ViewBox. event.clientX gives myself the x coordinate for the screen. If were to revisit the second to last example with a crop size of 400 by 300, and then add the new negative and values, this would be our new code: The result of applying the above viewBox transformation to the graphic is shown in the following image: Note that, unlike the transform attribute, the automatic transformation that is created due to a viewBox does not affect the x, y, width and height attributes on the element with the viewBox attribute. You can check the interactive demo out by visiting the link in the next section. SVGs have their own coordinate system. As y decreases the points move downin the coordinate system. If we were to change the meetOrSlice value to slice, we’d get different results for different values. The preserveAspectRatio used here is the default xMidYMid meet, which means that the mid-* axes are aligned with the middle axes of the viewport. We’re going to use each of these to define the “min-x” axis and “min-y” axis on the viewBox. This is because in SVG you can change coordinate systems within your SVG document by specifying a viewBox attribute on the top-level