Manual talk:$wgSVGConverters

transparent backgrounds
When using imagemagick you can change "-background white" to "-background none" to allow transparent backgrounds.

image quality
Is the image quality sufficient by media wikis expectations? I just wondered about http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:SPI_Kaskadierung.svg

Batik under Ubuntu 9x
That's how I managed: aptitude install sun-java6-jdk wget http://mirrors.linhub.com/apache/xmlgraphics/batik/batik-1.7.zip lrwxrwxrwx 1 root    root         9 2009-10-03 16:54 batik -> batik-1.7 drwxr-xr-x 6 root    root      4096 2008-01-06 11:11 batik-1.7 Modifications to LocalSettings.php $wgMaxShellMemory = 10000000; $wgSVGConverters['batik'] = '/usr/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar /opt/batik/batik-rasterizer.jar -w $width -d $output $input'; $wgSVGConverter = "batik";
 * Installed java from sun
 * Got Batik from Batik (the Ubuntu package seems to be uncomplete)
 * Dezipped in /opt/batik and made a symbolic link like this:
 * 1) $wgSVGConverter = "rsvg";
 * 2) Batik - best results but slow and big

Note: $wgMaxShellMemory is in KB, 10MB is maybe too much

... and the results look much prettier than with rsvg which also answers the previous comment. However, it may not handle certain Inkscape code. I actually installed Batik because I couldn't make the very simple HTML5 overview picture correctly render with rsvg.