How to render SVG with sharp text and manual kerning

If you want to render SVG vector graphics with text (i.e. convert it to a PNG), you might experience some problems: 1. the antialiasing glitch: the edges of the characters (even horizontal and vertical edges) are blurry; 2. the manual kerning glitch: if you specify manual kerning (by pressing Alt-Left or Alt-Right between two characters) in Inkscape, this gets ignored upon rendering. This blog post gives a solution to these problems.

To get rid of the antialiasing glitch, make sure your text is a text object, not a path. To check this, try to edit it with the text tool of Inkscape. If you can edit the text, then it's a text object. (If you have your text as path, you'll get the antialiasing glitch.) Then render the SVG with rsvg or The GIMP. There will be no antialiasing glitch in the output PNG. (If you render by exporting from Inkscape 0.46 or earlier, you'll get the antialiasing glitch. We tested it on Linux and Windows.)

To get rid of the manual kerning glitch, export the SVG to PNG in Inkscape. However, this introduces the antialiasing glitch. To get rid of both, you should use a patched rsvg, i.e. downloading, patching, compiling and installing rsvg for yourself. Get the patch from http://code.google.com/p/pts-mini-gpl/source/browse/#svn/trunk/pts-librsvg-manual-kerning-patch. As of now, the patch is for librsvg-2.26.0, but it is reported to apply cleanly to librsvg-2.22.3 as well. If you use Ubuntu Intrepid on an x86 system, you can get .deb packages from the attachments on https://www.epointsystem.org/trac/vending_machine/wiki/HotSpotLogo.

An example rendered image which avoids both problems is visible on https://www.epointsystem.org/trac/vending_machine/wiki/HotSpotLogo .