Adobe is pleased to announce a new Technology Preview release of the Adobe
SVG Viewer. This release of Adobe SVG Viewer "ASV6" represents the first
public availability of Adobe's next generation SVG viewing technology. The
release can be downloaded at http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html.

One of the key features in this Technology Preview release is a fairly
complete implementation of the Rendering Arbitrary XML (RAX) feature which
was first outlined in the April 29 version of the SVG 1.2 specification
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-SVG12-20030429/#rax). [More complete RAX
documentation should be available in the next SVG 1.2 spec.]

The release also includes:

* Audio and video - using official syntax from the SVG 1.2 spec
* Transitions – using our own syntax since SVG 1.2 does not define a syntax
* Text flows into arbitrary shapes – our own syntax, not yet updated to the
SVG 1.2 syntax
* Some support for XML Events (ev:event attribute on the script element)
* Some support for createEvent API for creation of custom event objects
which can be then dispatched
* Windows object
* SVGTimer object
* External SVG fonts and XML syntax to reference any external font
resources (both CEF and SVG).

Additional features implemented from SVG 1.0/1.1 include:

* External file references (e.g., symbols can be in a separate file)
* Cursors (including the use of arbitrary SVG as the cursor)
* Enhanced SVG DOM support (e.g., x/y/width/height on SVGRectElement,
animVal, etc.)
* Mutation events
* SVGElementInstance and event processing inside symbols

Within <foreignObject>, this version supports:

* HTML tables (e.g., table, tr, td)
* Some support for XHTML flows (e.g., div, p, span), with the current
limitation that all text must be wrapped in <p> and cannot go directly
inside <div>

The goal with this release is to allow pioneering SVG developers to
experiment with and provide feedback on new features, particularly those
under consideration for SVG 1.2. This feedback will help both the SVG
Working Group as it specifies SVG 1.2 and help Adobe as it implements
against this specification. This release is intended for developer
experimentation purposes only and should not be used for normal SVG viewing
purposes. For this release, we are only providing a Windows build. Most
of the testing has been restricted to Windows XP and IE. It may work on
other versions of Windows and with Netscape (4 and 7). For more information
about usage of this release, refer to the accompanying Public Beta license
agreement.

Although the build has been verified, it has received only a small amount
of quality assurance testing. We are aware of several problems, including
failure to provide backwards compatibility with all existing SVG code,
including some of the demos at http://www.adobe.com/svg.

All available documentation relative to this Technology Preview release is
included in the installation (c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG
Viewer 6\). The Implementation White Paper contains all of the information
that used to be found in CurrentSupport.pdf, plus some description of
Adobe's extensions, such as the context menu.

To provide feedback to the World Wide Web Consortium about SVG 1.2, send
email to www-svg@.... To report bugs and/or provide implementation
feedback to Adobe, please go to the SVG Zone on Adobe.com
(http://www.adobe.com/svg).

Thank you,
Adobe Systems, Inc.