Different SVG Output for mathematics symbols with dvisvgm used with htlatex or make4ht

Question

The tex file with the following code is to be converted into html.

\documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
    \begin{document}
    \(\implies\) and \(\iff\) \\
    \(a \implies b\) \(a \iff b\)
    \end{document}

The command

htlatex texfile "xhtml,svg"

is used to convert tex file into html. The symbols \implies and \iff get converted into svg images. The produced svg images are different for these symbols as seen in the attached image. How can this be solved?

Answer 1

Edit:

As Martin mentioned in the comments, some glyphs may exceed it's bounding box, which may result in a cropping of theirs parts. It is possible to tell dvisvgm to trace the actual glyph shape using --exact option. I will update tex4ht to use it. In the meantime, you may use a following .mk4 build file:

Make:image("svg$", "dvisvgm -n -p ${page} --exact -c 1.4,1.4 -s ${source} > ${output}")

The result:

Original answer:

It seems that dvisvgm sets wrong dimensions for some images, as it happens for standalone arrows in your example. It seems that height of the first two images is too small, so the image is cropped.

The height of the first image is 3.26027pt, vs 9.6859pt of the third one. It is clear that the height difference isn't as big.

I guess that the best solution would be to fix dvisvgm, but in the meantime, it is possible to use make4ht filters to guess the correct height value. The characters are saved in the SVG file as <path> elements:

<path d='M7.23288 -3.25778C7.65131 -2.89913 8.1594 -2.6401 8.48817 -2.49066C8.12951 -2.33126 7.64134 -2.07223 7.23288 -1.72354H0.9066C0.737235 -1.72354 0.547945 -1.72354 0.547945 -1.52428S0.727273 -1.32503 0.896638 -1.32503H6.78456C6.30635 -0.86675 5.78829 0.00996264 5.78829 0.139477C5.78829 0.249066 5.91781 0.249066 5.97758 0.249066C6.05729 0.249066 6.12702 0.249066 6.16687 0.169365C6.37609 -0.209215 6.65504 -0.737235 7.30262 -1.31507C7.99004 -1.92279 8.65753 -2.19178 9.17559 -2.34122C9.34496 -2.401 9.35492 -2.41096 9.37484 -2.43088C9.39477 -2.44085 9.39477 -2.47073 9.39477 -2.49066S9.39477 -2.53051 9.38481 -2.55044L9.35492 -2.57036C9.33499 -2.58032 9.32503 -2.59029 9.13574 -2.65006C7.79078 -3.04857 6.79452 -3.95517 6.23661 -5.02117C6.12702 -5.22042 6.11706 -5.23039 5.97758 -5.23039C5.91781 -5.23039 5.78829 -5.23039 5.78829 -5.1208C5.78829 -4.99128 6.29639 -4.12453 6.78456 -3.65629H0.896638C0.727273 -3.65629 0.547945 -3.65629 0.547945 -3.45704S0.737235 -3.25778 0.9066 -3.25778H7.23288Z' id='g0-41'/>

Every second number in the path is y coordinate. My naive approach is to process all y coordinates in the svg file, find the maximal value and set the height of the image to this value, if it is bigger than the original value. This approach isn't really robust, because curve sections may be rendered above the maximal coordinate, but I don't know how to solve this issue and I don't want to write proper SVG path parser. So we will hope that this doesn't matter much.

Save the following file as mybuild.mk4:

local filter = require "make4ht-filter"

local max = function(a,b)
  return a > b and a or b
end

local function get_height(svg)
  local height = svg:match("height='([0-9%.]+)pt'")
  return tonumber(height)
end

local function get_max_height(path,max_number)
  local coordinates = {}
  for number in path:gmatch("(%-?[0-9%.]+)") do
    table.insert(coordinates, tonumber(number))
  end
  for i = 2, #coordinates, 2 do
    max_number = max(max_number, coordinates[i])
  end
  return max_number
end

local function update_height(svg, height)
  return svg:gsub("height='.-pt'", "height='"..height .."pt'")
end

-- we need to fix the svg height
local process_svg = filter {function(svg)
  local max_height = 0
  local height = get_height(svg)
  for path in svg:gmatch("path d='([^']+)'") do
    -- find highest height in all paths in the svg file
    max_height = get_max_height(path, max_height)
  end
  -- update the height only if the max_height is larger than height set in the SVG file
  print(max_height, height)
  if max_height > height then
    svg = update_height(svg, max_height)
  end
  return svg
end}

Make:match("svg$", process_svg)

Compile the file using command

make4ht -u -e mybuild.mk4 texfile svg

This is the rendered result: