I've found librsvg to be pretty good. It's used for exactly this purpose in Gnome. You stick a Cairo surface behind it and it translates the operations to that.

I've found librsvg to be pretty good. It's used for exactly this purpose in Gnome. You stick a Cairo surface behind it and it translates the operations to that. https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg However, admittedly, I use it in combination with a full blown browser because it doesn't need/handle text completely. I like SVG, but I too have accepted that if I want stuff to render properly, the only place to find a usable and complete SVG engine is in a web browser.