I should've gone back out and made the most of another few hours of sun (there's still time, I suppose), but I had to drop off the grocery shopping, and figured I'd have a quick listen to the Mekons and Suede CDs. But I got a little distracted and figured I'd take another peek at the state of SVG under Linux (it's been a few months). It's marginally better than it was, apart from the state of the Adobe plugin - the late-2001 release of their SVG browser plugin doesn't do anything more than crash recent Mozillae, and nothing's happened since then (and they're probably more concerned with MacOS X these days, anyway). The Mozilla native SVG stuff is hampered by licensing issues, unfortunately. I pulled down and built KSVG, which managed to draw the graph^*, but crashed before rendering the text (I got the impression it was that fontconfig guff crashing). Outside of the realms of normal browsers, the CSIRO toolkit's viewer works (rock on, local talent !), though apparently it's been obsoleted by the Apache project viewer (which I didn't try just yet) ? Amaya says it supports SVG nowadays, and X-Smiles aims at supporting so many of the up-and-coming XML-oriented standards (eg. X-Forms, which I was vaguely curious about not long ago) that it should come with 3-D glasses and a leather flying cap.

[2002-10-08] Hey, if I shovel away some of my fonts, fontconfig's fc-cache utility doesn't crash. Konqueror + KSVG now renders the font stuff ok. It then crashes once I leave the page, but I'll consider it progress :