SVG rendering in a PyGame application

This is a complete example which combines hints by other people here. It should render a file called test.svg from the current directory. It was tested on Ubuntu 10.10, python-cairo 1.8.8, python-pygame 1.9.1, python-rsvg 2.30.0.

#!/usr/bin/python

import array
import math

import cairo
import pygame
import rsvg

WIDTH = 512
HEIGHT = 512

data = array.array('c', chr(0) * WIDTH * HEIGHT * 4)
surface = cairo.ImageSurface.create_for_data(
    data, cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, WIDTH, HEIGHT, WIDTH * 4)

pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((WIDTH, HEIGHT))
svg = rsvg.Handle(file="test.svg")
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)
svg.render_cairo(ctx)

screen = pygame.display.get_surface()
image = pygame.image.frombuffer(data.tostring(), (WIDTH, HEIGHT),"ARGB")
screen.blit(image, (0, 0)) 
pygame.display.flip() 

clock = pygame.time.Clock()
while True:
    clock.tick(15)
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            raise SystemExit

The question is quite old but 10 years passed and there is new possibility that works and does not require librsvg anymore. There is Cython wrapper over nanosvg library and it works:

from svg import Parser, Rasterizer


def load_svg(filename, surface, position, size=None):
    if size is None:
        w = surface.get_width()
        h = surface.get_height()
    else:
        w, h = size
    svg = Parser.parse_file(filename)
    rast = Rasterizer()
    buff = rast.rasterize(svg, w, h)
    image = pygame.image.frombuffer(buff, (w, h), 'ARGB')
    surface.blit(image, position)

I found Cairo/rsvg solution too complicated to get to work because of dependencies are quite obscure to install.

You can use Cairo (with PyCairo), which has support for rendering SVGs. The PyGame webpage has a HOWTO for rendering into a buffer with a Cairo, and using that buffer directly with PyGame.