SVG export results in invalid IDREF on a use element

After more troubleshooting, the issue seems to be isolated to a specific custom icon we’re using. We’ll be ferreting out which icon(s) introduce this error.

I’m still curious why Lucidchart wouldn’t see the issue with an href pointing to a non-existent ID.

Hi @Mark W , thanks for posting. Would you mind sending a temporary Support PIN for a document containing the icon in question so we can take a closer look?  For more information on generating a Support PIN, check out this Help Center article.

Hi @Emma D  After some further troubleshooting, I’ve discovered that the issue occurs with labels that have empty lines, such as unnecessary carriage returns at the start or end of a label.

When I export to SVG the example shown below, the result includes a use element with an attribute xlink:href=”#a”, but there is no element with id=”a”. The other use elements all have hrefs that refer to id attributes that do exist.

It would seem that LucidChart on SVG export is omitting “insignificant” whitespace but still referring to the omitted chunks of label when generating the use elements.
 

PIN to example shown above: pdsx7MDTDMeU

Thank you, Emma.

We reference SVGs exported from Lucidchart in XML documents that we transform to PDFs by means of Apache FOP, which uses Apache Batik for rendering SVGs. Batik evidently expects valid SVG XML and fails to render the SVG entirely, so if we don’t address the issue, the PDF has a blank space where the SVG should appear.

We have a workaround, which is to use XSLT to copy every SVG, omitting use elements that refer to IDs that don’t exist.

It’s quite difficult to spot the extra carriage returns manually in Lucidchart. Selecting the label doesn’t reveal extra CRs. Even double clicking on the label to select the text doesn’t reliably reveal them either. The only way we’ve found that 100% works is to be in edit mode for the label and try to move the insertion cursor beyond the apparent start or end of the label. Not remotely scalable.

I’m also looking at whether Batik can be configured to just chill out and ignore validity errors. So far, no luck.

Thank you Mark for the helpful context! I’ve passed this on in the bug report and will be sure to notify this thread with any updates.

We have also ran into the same issue with generating Metanorma PDF and Word files, and found this ticket. The problem is definitely not fixed. A number of LucidChart-exported SVGs exhibit this problem and they are invalid.

The exported SVGs fail validation and also cause issues with Adobe Illustrator and when imported into Word. Is there any ETA for a fix for generating “valid SVG XML” files? Thanks!

I’ve posted a workaround script as a GitHub Gist here, hope it helps someone. Thank you Mark for the workaround!

https://gist.github.com/ronaldtse/f878ebca1b9a4c4e52851fc00509c75c