Command line SVG and image file viewer in Linux?

Question

Is there any command line (pipeable) graph viewer for SVG, JPG, and PNG images?

I'm particularly looking for a way to pipe the graphs/images to the program, instead of using files, so there must be an option to specify the file type/extension.

Though gv works for PS/PDF generated by dot programs, I'd like to know whether there are alternatives for supporting SVG image files.

Answer 1

Have you tried the display program that comes with ImageMagick?

Answer 2

Inkscape already comes with its own viewer: inkview

It lacks features, it might be a bit slow, but it works (and probably renders SVG more accurately than ImageMagick's display).

Answer 3

I usually work with SVG as text files, so would like the viewer to automatically refresh the display as soon as the file got saved (and its contents got changed) - this should be applicable to 'pipable' situations, I think (i.e. with named pipes).

Note that, for default Gnome apps:

• evince currently works like this for PDFs, but seemingly it cannot read SVG (for me it generates "Unable to open document - Error opening file: Permission denied" when I tried to load SVG files)
• eog (Eye Of Gnome) - the latest versions - can also detect if a file changed on this, and then offer a 'Reload' button; but apparently, you'd still have to click on 'Reload' each time (I cannot see a way to cause automatic reload always on file change in eog, like evince behaves with PDFs) - and also, at least on my Ubuntu 10.04, eog SVG support is somewhat broken (zoom in results with blurry lines)
• ImageMagick's display not only does not automatically refresh when the file changes on disk - and even when you press 'refresh' in display, you still do not get the latest version of the file (meaning, you have to restart display to show the latest version :( ).

Here are some more notes I found so far:

• Squiggle, the SVG Browser The SVG browser that is part of the Batik toolkit. - Download Batik batik-1.7.zip; unpack it; run java -jar batik-squiggle.jar and there it is; does not refresh the image automatically if the svg file changed on disk
• SVG Image Viewer? - Ubuntu Forums recommendations:
  • In post #8 - "I wrote a little python script ... You just run it as: svg_compare.py and it opens up an svg and displays it using an svg library and using gtk's raster library. You can zoom with the mouse..."
  • xsvg (from http://cairographics.org) - I installed libsvg1_0.1.4-1_i386.deb, libsvg-cairo1_0.1.6-5_i386.deb and xsvg_0.2.1-3_i386.deb in that order; those versions are from 2005, and so xsvg is extremely simple - no zoom, nothing.. And needless to say, it does not react to saved file changes automatically...
• through that, I found rsvg-view, which I think is a part of sudo apt-get install librsvg2-bin. Its small, nice, supports stdin - however, also rsvg-view cannot detect a file change, and automatically refresh on it..

Yup - well, I hope this helps...
Cheers!

 

EDIT (Dec 24 '10): well, here is also my contribution: svg_refreshview.py - which is basically a rework of svg_compare.py mentioned above, that simply shows an SVG file, and reloads the file and refreshes the display if the file has been modified. (it can't really work with stdin - but there are other scripts in my repo that parse stdin in python, maybe they'll help).

EDIT2 (May 20 '12): Also, came up with a Perl-Tk script example, which is very crude (no mouse interaction, no nothing), but uses ImageMagick Perl API, and so can render SVG (as bitmap on a canvas), please see answer #10670039 - ImageMagick API for command-line GUI application interface to display - Stack Overflow.

Answer 4

What do you mean with 'pipe-able'?
feh is very good commandline viewer with tons of options.

Answer 5

I second Dennis Williamson's recommendation of ImageMagick display.

Also, you can sometimes use named pipes to pipe data to programs which read from a file.

Example:

mkfifo /tmp/foo.svg
cat /usr/share/inkscape/clipart/tux.svg > /tmp/foo.svg & inkscape /tmp/foo.svg
rm -f /tmp/foo.svg

Won't work with programs which expect to be able to seek backward in the file, though.

Answer 6

It seems Geeqie viewer handles svg graphics and it automatically loads the updated images. I don't know whether it can take images from stdin. I hope it helps.

Answer 7

You can use feh which is very fast.

here is the man feh

SUPPORTED FORMATS
     feh can open any format supported by Imlib2, most notably jpeg, png, pnm, tiff, and bmp. The gif format is also supported, but only for static images. In case of animations, only the first frame will be shown.  If the
     convert binary (supplied by ImageMagick) is available, it also has limited support for many other filetypes, such as svg, xcf and otf. Use --magick-timeout num with a non-negative value to enable it.

which says if you want to open a SVG file you should use: --magick-timeout num and num can be a positive number line 1.

So the usage should be look like this: feh --magick-timeout 1 file.svg

here is a screenshot of opening a SVG file

Answer 8

If you for some reason really really don't want to use a temporary file, you might at least use a named-pipe.

With it you can easily use Firefox and it -- by far -- outperforms Inkscape's inkview, imagemagick's display, etc.

# Shell 1
mkfifo /tmp/mypipe
long | chain | of | stuff > /tmp/mypipe

# Shell 2
firefox --new-window /tmp/mypipe

Answer 9

I ended up on this question and I ultimately solved it with some mix and match. The reason I wanted this was to see which SVG I would like to pick for my Emacs icon (you can change it with anything else you want). Note the following two commands are doing the same thing but one uses fd and the other uses find:

# using fd (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)
fd -a -e .svg emacs -X feh --conversion-timeout 5 {}

# using the GNU find
find /usr/share/icons -iname "*emacs*.svg" -exec feh --conversion-timeout 5 {} +

I hope this would save some time for people who end up here.

Answer 10

imv

The image viewer imv supports SVGs as well. It currently has no support for animations inside SVG, though.

Quoting from imv's project page, these are some of its features:

• Native Wayland and X11 support
• Support for dozens of image formats including:
  • PNG
  • JPEG
  • Animated GIFs
  • SVG
  • TIFF
  • Various RAW formats
  • Photoshop PSD files
• Configurable key bindings and behaviour
• Highly scriptable with IPC via imv-msg