svg viewbox resolution limits

Question

I was wondering if there are any hard limits to the viewbox of a svg element. I see weird clipping when I reach very low values ( say when vb width is around .002 ) or very larg

Answer 1

Firefox originally used a graphics library called cairo to do cross platform graphics rendering. Cairo only allows units to have 32 bits of fixed point binary precision so Firefox chose 24 bits before the binary point and 8 bits of binary fraction. So the maximum co-ordinates are then 2^24 and the smallest deltas 1/256.

Firefox has been replacing cairo with more direct platform rendering e.g. Direct2D on Windows which is used in preference to cairo now if you have a hardware acceleration capable graphics chip and have hardware acceleration enabled. The platform libraries don't have the cairo range limitation but do seem to have their own bugs with large co-ordinates.

Answer 2

The spec requires that browsers support single-precision floating point numbers. Browsers are encouraged to use double-precision numbers for some calculations, mostly matrix transformations, where small decimals are often important, but the general rule is standard C++ "float" data type.

From http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/types.html#Precision:

4.3 Real number precision

Unless stated otherwise for a particular attribute or property, a has the capacity for at least a single-precision floating point number and has a range (at a minimum) of -3.4e+38F to +3.4e+38F.

It is recommended that higher precision floating point storage and computation be performed on operations such as coordinate system transformations to provide the best possible precision and to prevent round-off errors.

Conforming High-Quality SVG Viewers are required to use at least double-precision floating point for intermediate calculations on certain numerical operations.

How does that relate to your issue?

A value of 0.002 shouldn't be a problem at all. Numbers like 200000000 would only be a problem if you then needed fine decimals. If your viewbox was "200000000 200000000 0.002 0.002" -- in other words, a very small range of very large numbers -- then floating point precision would likely be the problem. However, if there's a problem with low-precision large numbers or with decimals that can be exactly encoded by a float, then the browser isn't living up to the specs.

It could be that the browser is trying to smooth shapes, but is rounding to the nearest user unit instead of rounding to the nearest display pixel. Can you put together a simple example that demonstrates the specific problems you're seeing?