.svg doesn't open when chars in wrong encoding are present

[Patrick Storz]

When wrong encoding is set in header, a .svg file isn't opened at all, even if just one char is missing from selected charset.

Why don't display a box or some other placeholder like e.g. Firefox does when opening the "example.svg" in the attachment?
By simply changing encoding from "utf-8" to "iso-8859-15" in the .svg header the problem is solved.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

- Batik 1.7 (OS X 10.5.8) doesn't open it either:
  SVG Error: Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence.
- Inkscape 0.46+devel r22575 (OS X 10.5.8): console message attached
  complains about other errors besides the encoding.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

And it doesn't validate (http://validator.w3.org/check) unless you force the validator to use an appropriate encoding.

Is Inkscape expected to find out the correct encoding in this case?

Wishlist or invalid?

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

As to why Inkscape should not display a placeholder box, etc.
Firefox is a web *browsing* rendering agent, who's job it is to be forgiving and try to slow a closest approximation of what it can take guesses at. Inkscape is an SVG *creation* tool, who's job it is to create compliant SVG files.

Inkscape can't know what the proper encoding is. So if Inkscape read in such a file, it would be corrupting data and then saving out that corrupted data. In this case you the human were required to investigate the file and apply an intelligent decision on how to compensate for an error. We don't really have a general AI to solve that for all cases.

Of course, there is a question of whether or not setting things to "iso-8859-15" actually "solved" the problem or if it just happened to create a work-around. Should it have been "iso-8859-1", "iso-8859-7", "MacRoman", "Cp1252" or something else?

A better solution would be for the end user to determine where exactly things were corrupted earlier in the workflow. Something mangled the file, and stopping that would probably be much better in the long run.

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

There might be other things that Inkscape should do in this situation, but randomly corrupting arbitrary characters is not one of them.