For an IPhone app I have been building, I decided to use the UIWebView to render SVG files, instead of doing the vector rendering myself. I needed to have a way to read-in files generated from a vector authoring tool (Illustrator etc.) and after initially looking for an open-source SVG parsing/rendering engine of some sort, I decided on hosting the UIWebView itself instead and use the SVG rendering capability of WebKit. Another option could have been to read in PDF files as PDF is the default meta-file format for Quartz, but I needed programmatic access to each path drawn in the file and it was not apparent to me how I can do that once the PDF is rendered. (Any ideas on that is still welcome of course)

Anyways the point of this post is not really about different options for persisting and reading vector graphic files. I am rather planning to talk a bit about some of the tricky things I found out while trying to use the UIWebView programatically. Continue Reading »