svglite

svglite is a graphics device that produces clean svg output, suitable for use on the web, or hand editing. Compared to the built-in svg(), svglite produces smaller files, and leaves text as is, making it easier to edit the result after creation. It also support multiple nice features such as embedding of web fonts.

Installation

svglite is available on CRAN using install.packages("svglite"). You can install the development version from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/svglite")

Benchmarks

While the performance of svglite() and svg() is comparable (with an upper hand to svglite)…

library(svglite)

x <- runif(1e3)
y <- runif(1e3)
tmp1 <- tempfile()
tmp2 <- tempfile()

svglite_test <- function() {
  svglite(tmp1)
  plot(x, y)
  dev.off()
}
svg_test <- function() {
  svg(tmp2, onefile = TRUE)
  plot(x, y)
  dev.off()
}

plot(bench::mark(svglite_test(), svg_test()), type = 'ridge')

…it produces considerably smaller files:

file.size(c(tmp1, tmp2)) / 1024
#> [1]  74.88281 320.84668

In both cases, compressing to make .svgz is worthwhile. svglite supports compressed output directly and just need a .svgz extension in the filename to trigger it:

gz <- function(in_path, out_path = tempfile()) {
  out <- gzfile(out_path, "w")
  writeLines(readLines(in_path), out)
  close(out)
  
  invisible(out_path)
}
tmp3 <- tempfile(fileext = ".svgz")
svglite(tmp3)
plot(x, y)
invisible(dev.off())

file.size(c(tmp3, gz(tmp2))) / 1024
#> [1]  9.427734 38.589844