At the time of writing, there was no Microsoft-provided support for rendering SVG within applications. Therefore, public rendering libraries have had to utilized, but these have been found to be imperfect.

Two rendering engines have been included. If the filename for the SVG file ends in ‘1’ (for example, filename.svg1) then the alternate renderer will be used. This allows the renderer to be chosen on a file basis, regardless of how the file is employed.

Further to this, by preference a metafile is used to speed up image loading and rendering. The default approach can leave a gap around the symbol between it and connecting lines, which increases if lines of great thickness are used within the image. The extension ‘svg10’ uses an approach that prevents this from happening, but this can clip the image so the image might need modifying. A bitmap can be used as an alternative, by specifying a file extension of .svg00 or .svg01. The side effect here is that it will not have a transparent background.

All coloring is under the control of the SVG renderer. System Architect does not currently support overriding of fill or pen colors as it does for metafile images; therefore, System Architect does not support a depiction style other than RETAIN STYLE for SVG images.