Executive Summary

Many design and frontend teams that rely on hand‑crafted SVGs for icons and illustrations run into a recurring problem: Inkscape (and other vector editors) can silently rewrite structure, strip metadata, or expand paths in ways that break design‑system contracts and increase bundle size. This issue is not niche — it affects a meaningful subset of the estimated 10 million design and development teams that together represent a $40B tooling market — and it shows up as wasted review time, broken builds, and regressions in production assets. The product to consider is an automated, semantic SVG fixer that detects editor‑induced changes and restores or preserves a canonical source while offering lossless optimizations: a CLI/CI linter, GitHub Actions and IDE integrations, an auto‑PR fixer that applies reversible AST‑level transformations, plus policy rulesets for design systems. The core engine would perform structural diffs, map common Inkscape transform patterns to canonical rules, preserve IDs/ARIA metadata, and fall back to guided manual edits for ambiguous cases. Timing is favorable: organizations are standardizing SVG usage as part of design‑system adoption, frontend teams are focused on micro‑performance and tiny assets, and shift‑left toolchains mean developers expect linters and auto‑fixes in CI/IDE. Given the $40B addressable market and rising emphasis on asset correctness and size, a focused tool that saves engineering and review time could capture enterprise customers and grow via integrations. To stand out you need two things: technical depth (semantic, reversible fixes with a goal of >90% automated resolution of non‑semantic damages) and trust (an open‑source core or transparent diffing so teams can validate fixes). The main challenges are handling the diversity of authoring tools and Inkscape versions, maintaining heuristics for edge cases, and convincing design‑system owners to adopt automated fixes, but a pragmatic, rules‑driven approach with enterprise policy controls can mitigate those risks.

Executive Summary

Market Opportunity

Inkscape mangles hand-crafted SVGs — automated SVG-preserving fixer targets a $40.0B = 10M design & dev teams x $4K avg annual spend on design/dev tooling and collaboration suites total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% CAGR (developer tooling & design-system tools).

Key trends driving demand: Design systems adoption -- organizations standardize SVG usage, raising demand for tooling that preserves canonical source.; Frontend performance focus -- emphasis on tiny, semantically-correct assets creates need for intelligent optimization.; Shift-left tooling -- teams increasingly fix issues in CI/IDE; developers expect linters and automated PR fixes.; AI-for-code advances -- models now can reason about AST/markup and apply semantics-preserving edits..

Key competitors include SVGO / SVGOMG, Prettier (svg support via plugins), Figma (workaround/adjacent), Boxy SVG / SVGator (commercial editors).

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Inkscape mangles hand-crafted SVGs — automated SVG-preserving fixer

Executive Summary

Inkscape mangles hand-crafted SVGs — automated SVG-preserving fixer

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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