SVG Cleaner is an open source, cross-platform and completely free graphical and command-line software project implemented in Qt and designed from the ground up to be used as a tool for cleaning up SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files from unnecessary data.

Usually, SVG images produced by various vector graphics editors, such as Inkscape, contain all sorts of attributes and elements that have no use in the real world, which means that their sizes are quite generous.

Using the SVG Cleaner software, you can remove all that data. The resulted images will be approximately 40-60 percent smaller than the original ones, as the project removes elements and attributes that don't contribute to the final rendering.

If the application is not available in the Software Center app of your GNU/Linux distribution, you can easily install it from the source tarball. Download the latest version from Softpedia, save the archive on your PC, unpack it, open a Terminal app and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/SVGCleaner-0.6.2).

Run either of the ‘qmake-qt4’ or ‘qmake’ commands, depending on your Qt installation, to configure the program, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile it. After a successful installation, run either of the ‘make install’ or ‘sudo make install’ commands, depending if you’re root or a user with root privileges, to install it system wide.

Taking a look under the hood of the SVG Cleaner application, we can notice that it has been written entirely in the C++ programming language and that it uses the Qt GUI toolkit for its graphical user interface.

Being written in Qt means that SVG Cleaner is a platform-independent application that can be easily ported to the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. At the moment, it has been successfully tested on 32-bit and 64-bit distributions of Linux.