SVG rendering in a PyGame application. Prior to Pygame 2.0, Pygame did not support SVG. Then how did you load it?

In a pyGame application, I would like to render resolution-free GUI widgets described in SVG.

How can I achieve this?

(I like the OCEMP GUI toolkit but it seems to be bitmap dependent for its rendering)

Answer

This is a complete example which combines hints by other people here. It should render a file called test.svg from the current directory. It was tested on Ubuntu 10.10, python-cairo 1.8.8, python-pygame 1.9.1, python-rsvg 2.30.0.

#!/usr/bin/python

import array
import math

import cairo
import pygame
import rsvg

WIDTH = 512
HEIGHT = 512

data = array.array('c', chr(0) * WIDTH * HEIGHT * 4)
surface = cairo.ImageSurface.create_for_data(
    data, cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, WIDTH, HEIGHT, WIDTH * 4)

pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((WIDTH, HEIGHT))
svg = rsvg.Handle(file="test.svg")
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)
svg.render_cairo(ctx)

screen = pygame.display.get_surface()
image = pygame.image.frombuffer(data.tostring(), (WIDTH, HEIGHT),"ARGB")
screen.blit(image, (0, 0)) 
pygame.display.flip() 

clock = pygame.time.Clock()
while True:
    clock.tick(15)
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            raise SystemExit