# Overview of Librsvg's API

Librsvg's API is divided into two main parts: one for loading SVG data and one for rendering it. In the loading stage, you create an RsvgHandle object from SVG data, which can come from a file or from a stream of bytes. In the rendering stage, you take an RsvgHandle and ask it to render itself to a Cairo context.

Loading

RsvgHandle is an object that represents SVG data in memory. Your program creates an RsvgHandle from an SVG file, or from a memory buffer that contains SVG data, or in the most general form, from a GIO stream that will provide SVG data. At this stage you can get either I/O errors or parsing errors. If loading completes successfully, the RsvgHandle will be ready for rendering.

Rendering

Once you have an SVG image loaded into an RsvgHandle, you can render it to a Cairo context any number of times, or to different Cairo contexts, as needed. As a convenience, you can pick a single element in the SVG by its "id" attribute and render only that element; this is so that sub-elements can be extracted conveniently out of a larger SVG.