Archive for April, 2009

“Introducing” Adobe SVG Viewer 8

Friday, April 17th, 2009
Properties screenshot of a file shipped with Adobe Reader 8

Properties screenshot of a file shipped with Adobe Reader 8

A common belief is that ASV 6 Developer Release 1 was the last version of the famous Adobe SVG Viewer software (ASV 3.03 being the last stable release). Well, apparently not… ;-)

Distributed with Adobe Reader 8, one can take a peek at the ImageViewer.API file, placed within the plug_ins directory (full path will typically be %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader\plug_ins\ImageViewer.API. The original filename, NPSVG8.dll (see screenshot), is probably familiar to whoever has played with previous ASV versions: NPSVGX.dll stands for Netscape Plugin, where X is the major version number; the file was used for deploying the plug-in in browsers, such as Firefox (Gecko) and Safari (WebKit), who didn’t natively support SVG by then. As of today, at least Firefox is no longer compatible with the plug-in (and Safari will likely follow) but they don’t need to anyway: a good level of native SVG support is available in modern browsers. :-)

(more…)