aleyan
8 hours ago
I have been using SVGs for charts on my blog for a couple of months[0] now. Using SVGs satisfied me, but in all honesty, I don't think anyone else cares. For completeness the benefits are below:
* The charts are never blurry
* The text in the chart is selectable and searchable
* The file size could be small compared to PNGs
* The charts can use a font set by a stylesheet
* The charts can have a builtin dark mode (not demonstrated on my blog)
Additionally as the OP shown, the text in SVG is indexed by google, but comes up in the image sections [1].
The downside was hours of fiddling with system fonts and webfonts and font settings in matplotlib. Also the sizing of the text in the chart and how it is displayed in your page is tightly coupled and requires some forethought.
[0] https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-llm-assistant-census
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22slabiciunea+lui+Nicu+fore...
cainxinth
8 hours ago
That's the kind of thing you do not for the users but because of your own standards, and even if no one else appreciates it, you always do.
Ciantic
7 hours ago
It does come up in normal results for me, I don't need to go to the images section, the page has keyword for testing lmtbk4mh, see result https://www.google.com/search?q=lmtbk4mh
mk12
6 hours ago
Another thing to watch out for with SVGs is how they appear in RSS readers or browser reader views. If you're using external SVG files then it should be fine. If you've optimized them by embedding into the HTML, then you need to be careful. If they rely on CSS rules in the page's CSS then it's not going to work well. For my website I try to make the SVGs self-sufficient by setting the viewBox, width, and height attributes, using a web safe font, and only relying on internal styles. You can still get some measure of light/dark mode support by setting fill or stroke to currentColor.
coder543
4 hours ago
They appear to have “solved” the RSS problem by only providing one sentence of content with each entry in the RSS feed.
bArray
6 hours ago
What are you using to produce the graphs?
I wrote a small graphing library for mine [1], but it has limitations.
[1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/sound-source-delta.html
Theodores
8 hours ago
To complete the test, the website needs an HTML page that is mostly SVG. I think that might stand a chance of getting into the main search results rather than just the image search.
Also of interest for me would be whether SVG description markup gets picked up in the index.
To complete the search of possibilities, having the SVG generated by Javascript on page load would be of interest, for example, with some JSON object of data that then gets parsed to plot some SVG images.
Your SVG graphs are very neat and nobody caring is a feature not a bug. If they were blurry PNGs then people might notice but nobody notices 'perfection', just defects.
I noticed you were using 'NASA numbers' in your SVGs. Six decimal places for each point on a path is a level of precision that you can cut down with SVGOMG or using the export features from Inkscape. I like to go for integers when possible in SVG.
The thing with SVG is that the levels of optimisation go on forever. For example, I would set the viewbox coordinates so that (0, 0) is where the graph starts. Nobody would ever notice or care about that, but it would be something I would have to do.
aleyan
7 hours ago
Oh man, this is a deep mine to dig. I haven't even thought about svg size optimization. The default blog template I used really wants me to use hero images, and the jpgs are already hefty. I just looked at my network panel, and it seems the font files are loaded once per svg on initial load and then are cached.
What is the motivation for viewbox coordinates being at (0,0)? I have been thinking about setting chart gutters so that the graph is left aligned with the text, but this seems like an orthogonal issue.
AndrewSwift
5 hours ago
Yes! We do that with svija.com/en — an all SVG website with an HYML wrapper so it displays at the correct size.