Affinity is unable to show mesh gradients from Inkscape SVG files

[le2222]

bug: Affinity is unable to show mesh gradients from Inkscape SVG files (it shows a blank area instead)

This bug happens in Affinity Designer 2, Photo 2 and Publisher 2 (version is 2.5.7) on Windows 10

The bug happens with regular Inkscape SVG files and also for plain SVG files.

 

This is how the original SVG looks like in Inkscape:

 

This is how the SVG looks like in Google Chrome:

 

This is how the SVG looks like in Affinity:

The hardware acceleration is not available in my machine. I tried the 'dither gradient' and 'precise clipping' options instead but the output did not change.

To reproduce the issue, open Inkscape then create your own object with gradient mesh, (here is the tutorial: https://inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/creating-a-mesh-gradient.html ) then saves it as inkscape svg or plain svg then open this file in Affinity Designer, Photo or Publisher.

Inkscape_SVG.svg plain_SVG.svg

Edited January 1 by le2222

[Komatös]

Hi @le2222 and welcome to the forums.

This may seem like a bug, but it's just a lack of functions. Unfortunately, the Affinity programmes only support a subset of SVG.

[le2222]

@Komatös Affinity DOES HAVE the Mesh Warp feature (it's not missing!). The problems are:

1- Objects made with Inkscape Mesh won't show up properly in Affinity (or won't show up at all)

2- There is no error message warning the user about the missing parts/elements!

 

For example when an user opens a document with a missing font, they get an alert message so they know that what they see is not exactly the content of the original file.

However in this current situation, Affinity just opens the file in the wrong way and don't let the user know that what they see is not exactly what that file meant to be!

Edited January 1 by le2222

[Komatös]

14 minutes ago, le2222 said:

However in this current situation,

Yes, Affinity Designer can do mesh warp, but not filling with vector gradients!
Bitmap filling, on the other hand, is no problem.

[le2222]

@Komatös If that is the case I would say it should warn the user that the file was not loaded properly because of the lack of support for the Mesh gradients.

[David in Яuislip]

SVG gradients are defined for linear and radial types, this may change if SVG 2.0 is ever published
Mesh gradients by Inkscape are shown by browsers which display the polyfill
It is unreasonable to expect any software to warn of not supporting what is essentially Inkscape proprietary markup

[le2222]

It is the responsibility of the software that supposedly opens SVGs from other sources to notify the user that there are elements in the file that were not imported correctly due to lack of support. Otherwise, the user would never know if the loaded image is flawless or corrupted.

Edited January 2 by le2222

[LionelD]

Well, this thread is very informative, thanks.

Thanks