Can you control how an SVG's stroke-width is d

Question

Currently building a browser-based SVG application. Within this app, various shapes can be styled and positioned by the user, including rectangles.

When I apply a stroke-width to an SVG rect element of say 1px, the stroke is applied to the rect’s offset and inset in different ways by different browsers. This is proving to be troublesome, especially when I try to calculate the outer width and visual position of a rectangle and position it next to other elements.

For example:

• Firefox adds 1px inset (bottom and left), and 1px offset (top and right)
• Chrome adds 1px inset (top and left), and 1px offset (bottom and right)

My only solution so far would be to draw the actual borders myself (probably with the path tool) and position the borders behind the stroked element. But this solution is an unpleasant workaround, and I’d prefer not to go down this road if possible.

So my question is, can you control how an SVG’s stroke-width is drawn on elements?

Answer 1

As people above have noted you'll either have to recalculate an offset to the stroke's path coordinates or double its width and then mask one side or the other, because not only does SVG not natively support Illustrator's stroke alignment, but PostScript doesn't either.

The specification for strokes in Adobe's PostScript Manual 2nd edition states: "4.5.1 Stroking: The stroke operator draws a line of some thickness along the current path. For each straight or curved segment in the path, stroke draws a line that is centered on the segment with sides parallel to the segment." (emphasis theirs)

The rest of the specification has no attributes for offsetting the line's position. When Illustrator lets you align inside or outside, it's recalculating the actual path's offset (because it's still computationally cheaper than overprinting then masking). The path coordinates in the .ai document are reference, not what gets rastered or exported to a final format.

Because Inkscape's native format is spec SVG, it can't offer a feature the spec lacks.

Answer 2

You can use CSS to style the order of stroke and fills. That is, stroke first and then fill second, and get the desired effect.

MDN on paint-order: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/paint-order

CSS code:

paint-order: stroke;

Answer 3

No, you cannot specify whether the stroke is drawn inside or outside an element. I made a proposal to the SVG working group for this functionality in 2003, but it received no support (or discussion).

As I noted in the proposal,

• you can achieve the same visual result as "inside" by doubling your stroke width and then using a clipping path to clip the object to itself, and
• you can achieve the same visual result as 'outside' by doubling the stroke width and then overlaying a no-stroke copy of the object on top of itself.

Edit: This answer may be wrong in the future. It should be possible to achieve these results using SVG Vector Effects, by combining veStrokePath with veIntersect (for 'inside') or with veExclude (for 'outside). However, Vector Effects are still a working draft module with no implementations that I can yet find.

Edit 2: The SVG 2 draft specification includes a stroke-alignment property (with center|inside|outside possible values). This property may make it into UAs eventually.

Edit 3: Amusingly and dissapointingly, the SVG working group has removed stroke-alignment from SVG 2. You can see some of the concerns described after the prose here.