Librsvg as a product

A full build of librsvg produces several artifacts, which are the final “products” that are produced from the build. We will discuss them in three groups: library artifacts, rsvg-convert artifacts, and others.

Library artifacts

Librsvg is part of the GNOME platform libraries, and needs to maintain a C-compatible API with ABI stability across versions.

The build produces these artifacts, which are typical of GNOME libraries that can be used from C and other languages:

  • A shared library librsvg-2.so (the file extension will be different on MacOS or Windows). This is usually installed as part of the system’s libraries. For example, the GTK toolkit assumes that librsvg’s library is installed in the system, and uses it to load SVG assets like icons. Applications can generally link to this library and load SVG documents for different purposes.

  • A group of C header files (*.h) that will be installed in the system’s location for header files. C and C++ programs can use these directly.

  • A librsvg-2.pc file for pkg-config. This lets compilation scripts find the location of the installed library and header files.

  • .gir and .typelib files for GObject Introspection. These are machine-readable descriptions of the API/ABI in the .so library, which are used by language bindings to make librsvg’s functionality available to many programming languages.

  • A .vapi description of the API for the Vala language compiler.

Rust API

Apart from the C-compatible library, the Rust code for the library defines a librsvg crate that can be used by Rust programs. Since version 2.57.0, librsvg is available as a regular crate in crates.io.

rsvg-convert artifacts

rsvg-convert is a command-line tool to render SVG documents to various output formats. It is a very widely-used tool, and many scripts and systems depend on it maintaining a stable set of command-line options.

The build produces these:

  • The rsvg-convert executable. This is the tool that most end-users interact with.

  • A Unix manual page for rsvg-convert(1).

Other artifacts

  • A libpixbufloader-svg.so module for gdk-pixbuf. This allows programs to use the gdk-pixbuf API to load SVG documents, as if they were raster files like JPEG or PNG.

  • A librsvg.thumbnailer configuration file, to tell GNOME’s thumbnailing mechanism that it can just use gdk-pixbuf when trying to create a thumbnail for an SVG file. These thumbnails can then get displayed in file managers.

  • Documentation for the C API, published online and also installed on the system in a place where GNOME’s DevHelp can find it.

  • Documentation for the Rust API, published online. This is not built from the normal make process, but independently as part of the Continuous Integration pipeline.

  • The rendered HTML version of this development guide. This is not built from the normal make process, but independently as part of the Continuous Integration pipeline.