Small unscaled SVG rendering blurry and wrong in all browsers

Question

I have an SVG that renders completely awfully in all browsers.

There's lots of questions here about fuzzy SVG rendering but all the questions I saw were specific to certain browsers, or involved scaling, or applying transforms, or using SVG filters, or using as a background-image, etc.

This is not upscaled or downscaled, and there are no filters or anything funky going on, just a single path in an element. It's 24x24px. When I zoom in it looks fine, and it looks great on retina screens.

On the left is the image in Sketch (looks equally good in Illustrator etc). On the right is the image in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on OS X. Of the 3 icons, the top is normal, middle has transform: rotate(0.1deg) (saw some people had some success with that), and on the bottom it has shape-rendering: crispEdges. They're all cruddy:

Looked bad to varying degrees on a Windows machine, including in IE.

Here's the SVG:

Here are some things I tried that didn't work:

Exporting the SVG from Illustrator with path values rounded to 1 decimal place (wouldn't let me do 0 decimal places) to see if it had something to do with how they fell on pixel boundaries.
Exporting a "larger" (bigger viewbox and path spread out to accommodate it) SVG and scaling it down in the browser. This looked marginally better, but still not good enough.
Playing with the stroke-width - just makes it look bad but in different ways.
Various CSS transforms purported to improve issues like this, + every option for shape-rendering + enlarging image and transform: scaleing it down again.

Strangely, the basic layout of the SVG is simply different in the browser - there should be 2 pixels of space inside the letter, but even with crisp anti-aliasing there's only 1 pixel of space in all browsers.

Is there any way to improve this? Is it something to do with this particular SVG? Or is it just that browsers are really bad at rendering small SVGs?

Paul LeBeau · Accepted Answer

The results when I try your SVG are not as bad as your screenshot. So I'm not sure why that is. Sketch looks like it may be bumping the geometry to line up with pixel boundaries - not unlike font renderers.

You can significantly improve the look of your icon by thinking about how the outlines of your shape are with respect to pixel boundaries.

If you blow up your icon a bit, and draw grid lines corresponding to a 24x24 pixel rendering, you will see what I mean:

var grid = document.getElementById("grid");
for (var i=1; i<24; i++) {
  var line = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/2000/svg", "line");
  line.setAttribute("x1", 0);
  line.setAttribute("y1", i);
  line.setAttribute("x2", 24);
  line.setAttribute("y2", i);
  grid.appendChild(line);
  line = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/2000/svg", "line");
  line.setAttribute("x1", i);
  line.setAttribute("y1", 0);
  line.setAttribute("x2", i);
  line.setAttribute("y2", 24);
  grid.appendChild(line);
}

You can see that the lines of your shape are falling exactly halfway between the final pixels. That will result in the worst possible antialiasing. You should consider tweaking your icon design to move the lines so they correspond with pixels better. Turn on grid lines in Sketch and set them up to show the pixel boundaries. And work from there.

Small unscaled SVG rendering blurry and wrong in all browsers

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