topic Re: options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors in New SAS User

options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors

Peter_L — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:25:36 GMT

In SAS 9.4M5 in Windows 10 64-bit the following gives unparsable SVG graphics:

options colophon="© Company";
ods html5 device=svg options(svg_mode='img');
/* some graphics output */

What you find in the *.svg file is a line like this between desc and defs (line 4):

In the HTML page which refers to this you may see a broken link symbol or nothing. If you open the SVG file in a browser you may see nothing. If you are lucky (e.g. using Firefox) you will see a parse error message.

I have not tried this with embedded SVG because I need a separate img file.

A workaround is to replace the copyright symbol © with plain ASCII (c) or the word "copyright".

@Sas Please could you fix this minor bug which is very difficult to diagnose.

Re: options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:29:49 GMT

Have you already brought this to the attention of SAS technical support? If not, do it. It is the avenue for reporting bugs.

Re: options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors

Peter_L — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:41:32 GMT

Yes, I have informed SAS support. This is the fastest way to inform fellow sufferers.

Re: options colophon= with copyright symbol gives SVG errors

Peter_L — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 12:12:10 GMT

SAS Support has determined that this problem is an interaction with the encoding. When SAS is running with UTF-8 encoding the SVG file also has UTF-8 encoding and the problem does not arise. In wlatin1 encoding the SVG file causes some browser parsers to fail.

I use wlatin1 encoding because UTF-8 does not work for me owing to an incompatibility between SAS and the ODBC driver for SAP SQL Anywhere in UTF-8 mode related to the width of character columns. This has gone via SAS Support to the engineering queue.