Files carrying a .svg suffix usually are what they say they are, but the suffix is not proof. viewBox and width/height disagree — a very common bug — and the graphic scales wrong.
| Written by | W3C SVG Working Group |
| Full name | Scalable Vector Graphics |
| Usual MIME type | image/svg+xml |
| Extension | .svg |
The structure, briefly
Plain XML; the root <svg> element declares width, height and a viewBox, and geometry lives in <path> elements using M/L/C/Q/A commands.
Because the file is text, an SVG can be read and edited by any editor, but the same file can be silently re-minified by a build pipeline and lose its IDs.
Recognising the format
The format announces itself in plain text:
Getting it open
Installed options: Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Any browser, Scribus. None of them have to be the program that made the file: Universal Viewer reads it and writes nothing back.
Converting .svg to something usable
The targets people actually ask for are .png, .jpg, .pdf, .eps, .ai. Each one has its own page with the settings that matter: svg → png, svg → jpg, svg → pdf, svg → eps, svg → ai
M. Halvorsen re-read this on 2026-10-05.
Notes from the file library
Files of this kind are catalogued with the family named in the table above. The family groups them by what a file carries, not by the application that wrote it, which is why two extensions from the same application can sit in different families.
Two things decide whether a file can be opened on a machine that never had the application that made it: the header, which says what the container is, and the structure behind it, which says whether the contents can be read at all. The conversion guides listed on the page cover the targets that come up most often.
Format pages are rebuilt with each release of the toolset, and the review line at the bottom of the page is when an editor last checked the entry against a file. If a page disagrees with a file you have, send the first sixteen bytes and the build number to the support address and the entry is corrected in the next build.