4 useful Commercial SVG tools

In a previous post about SVG, I looked at 5 useful Open Source SVG tools, in this article I’ll be looking at 4 Commercial SVG tools that are popular and useful with a wide audience mainly because of the support from an organisation can be greater than something open sourced since many of these tools are built on a Proprietary platform and are industry leading.

A reminder of what is SVG?

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format (and very flexible in that images can be searched, indexed, scripted, and compressed) and an open standard developed since 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is supported by the major browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9-10, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

SVG images allow three types of graphic objects: vector graphics, raster graphics, and text. Graphical objects, such as PNG and JPEG raster images are easily grouped modified, styled transformed and composed into different rendered objects and can have their behaviors easily modified using XML text files, therefore using text editiors is one way of creating SVG images.

Because of the support for this format and modern browsers supporting it natively there are a variety of useful tools both commercial and open-sourced.

Useful Commercial SVG tools

I recommend the following tools for interacting with SVG’s:

1. EditiX

EditiX is an XML editor and relatively easy to use with an XML editor, Visual schema editor and xslt debugger which all have support for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms and is primarly designed to help users take advantage of the latest XML latest XML and XML-related technologies such as XSLT / FO, DocBook and XSD Schema.

EditiX is capeable of supporting XML, DTD, XHTML, XSLT, XSD, XML RelaxNG, SVG, MathML and XML FO.

2. Sketsa SVG Editor

Sketsa SVG Editor is a SVG vector drawing application with cross platform support.

Sketsa is capeale of drawing SVG Vector graphics because it is its native file format and it features a varity of tools for optimizing content creation.

Its design tools allow selection, drawing, rendering and editing of objects relatively easily and it supports SVG specific shape tools , , , , , and support additional illustration tools for freeform shapes and for curve shape.

3. CorelDraw

CorelDraw is a vector graphics editor developed by the Corel Corporation, based in Canada and was known for spawning several innovations in vector-based illustration which included a tool that operates differently on different objects, fit text-to-path, stroke-before-fill, quick fill/stroke color selection palettes, perspective projections, mesh fills and complex gradient fills.

CorelDraw is capeable of accessing PDF files and interacting with files from Adobe PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and other programs and is an industry-standard editor used in the graphic design, sign making and fashion design industries, so there is plenty of support for this software tool. It can also generate TrueType and Type 1 fonts.

4. Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is the industry leading editor and is more premium priced than the other products and works extremely well with other products within the Adobes Creative Suite packages.

The ai file format is a common vector format and the Illustrators feature set allows for the creation of relatively complex vector artwork. There is support for over a dozen formats which includes PSD, PDF, SVG, AI, SVGZ, GIF, JPG, PNG, WBMP, and SWF.

Its vector drawing interface is regard has one of the best and its complementary tools, are refined especially when dealing with curve and anchor points however the skill needed to use this tool is relatively high and there is a steep learning curve.

Do you have any favourite tools that are commercially used and maybe lesser well known, let us know your recommendations too!

This post is part of our “SVG Article Index” in these articles, we aim to help you build knowledge and understand SVG.