SVG height incorrectly calculated in Webkit browsers - css

Question

I have a issue specific to Webkit browsers (Safari & Chrome, on Mac & PC).
I'm using Raphael JS to render SVG data and using a responsive layout to scale the SVGs with the browser window. The SVGs are set to 100% width/height using JQuery. The containing elements have their widths set in percentages to maintain the ratios of the layout as the page resizes.
Trouble is Webkit doesn't calculate the height correctly, it adds extra pixels (sometimes hundreds) around the SVG image; which breaks the layout.
If you open the following link in a Webkit browser you'll see the green extra pixel areas. If you use the developer inpspector in safari you'll see the reported size for the SVG is bigger than the SVG displayed.
http://e-st.glam.ac.uk/simulationgames/svgheightbug/index.html
If you open the link in Firefox or Opera you'll see the layout as it should work (the green here is caused by margins I have deliberately set).
IE8 was having a similar problem which using height:auto fixed, but this won't work in Webkit.
Has anybody else had this problem? Anybody have a solution?
I think it may be a Webkit bug (checked the nightly build already, issue persists), but before I log it I thought check to make sure nobody else has a solution first.

Answer 1

svg { max-height: 100%; }
WebKit bug documented here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82489
I also added the workaround to the bug tracker.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem for Safari. Case was that the svg width and height were rendered as dom element attributes (in my case width="588.75px" height="130px"). Defining width and height in css could not overwrite this dimension setting.
To fix this for Safari I removed the width and height information from the SVG file while keeping viewBox intact (you can edit .svg files with any text editor).
Git diff snippet of my .svg file:
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
viewBox="0 0 588.75 130"
- height="130"
- width="588.75"
xml:space="preserve"
version="1.1"

Answer 3

I just set the height to a very large size in the svg to maintain the aspect ratio. Using 100% comes with too many problems. This works better for me because I did not want to use js.
Full props to:
http://www.seowarp.com/blog/2011/06/svg-scaling-problems-in-ie9-and-other-browsers/
width="1200" height="235.5"

Answer 4

It's hard for me to understand exactly what you want with your example, or what is not as you intend it. However, in general, if you are using a layout with percentage widths and height containers and you want content to fill those containers, you need to take them out of the flow (using position:absolute on the content and position:relative or position:absolute on the containers).
Here's a simple example that works find in Chrome and Safari:
http://phrogz.net/SVG/size-to-fill.xhtml
The #foo div has its height and width as a percentage of the body. It has a red background that will never be seen because the SVG is position:absolute inside it and set to fill it completely, and have a green background. If you ever see red, it is an error.
#foo, svg { position:absolute }
#foo { left:20%; width:30%; top:5%; height:80%; background:red; }
svg { top:0; left:0; width:100%; height:100%; background:green; }
<div id="foo"><svg ...></svg></div>

Answer 5

This is a known issue that has been fixed by the Chromium team with version 15.0.874.121. I verified this fix myself just today.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98951#c27

Answer 6

i know how to fix it, you have just to put this at the begining of your svg file: "preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin none" it must be into svg tag like this:
Problem will be fix

Answer 7

As previously pointed out WebKit's scaling of SVG improved recently. It is still quite broken in the current Safari (version 5.1, WebKit 534), in my opinion. I did a few experiments and recorded my findings on my website:
http://www.vlado-do.de/svg_test/
In short: embedding svg with <object> works under most conditions in WebKit 535. For older WebKit I embed it in an <img> tag. That's fine if you don't want links inside your svg (but it does not work in older Gecko and strangely also is problematic in current Chromium).

Answer 8

I found that adding "position: absolute;" to the image element (if it's within a parent that's also absolutely positioned), which had my .svg being called, made the "height: 100%;" declaration become relative to its container instead of the page/browser/device.
Tested this on both Chrome and Safari (mobile webkit) for iOS 7.1, and it fixed my problem (the .svg file was going way outside of its container).
Hopefully this a somewhat reliable fix for others here who were having trouble. Worth a shot?

Answer 9

I was having a problem with Javascript returning incorrect "height" values for SVGs, and I found the solution was simply to run my script (the bit that needed to access the height) on window.load rather than document.ready.
document.ready fires when the DOM is ready, but images have not necessarily been rendered at this point. At the point where window.load fires, images will have been loaded (and thus the browser will be able to access their dimensions correctly).