> One gotcha is that you won't get any CSS this way, so all styling has to be done via SVG props.

There actually is a way to bake stylesheets directly into the SVG in a way that at least Inkscape can read, but it's tricky. We're successfully doing this in a graphing library tuned for genetic data that's built on top of d3 called LocusZoom.

The first step is to get the content of the stylesheet into a string. We do that here with a CORS request in case the stylesheet is being loaded over a CDN, as javascript won't be able to access the content of CDN-loaded stylesheets from document.styleSheets:

https://github.com/statgen/locuszoom/blob/v0.4.0/assets/js/a...

Since the stylesheet doesn't change once the page is loaded this only needs to happen once. From there, in our case, we have a dynamic/interactive SVG plot so the download needs to bundle up the current state of the SVG on request. Here's the method that does that:

https://github.com/statgen/locuszoom/blob/v0.4.0/assets/js/a...

Other than what no doubt looks familiar for pulling the raw SVG markup into a string we also insert a tag right after the opening <svg> tag that looks like this:

"<style type=\"text/css\"><![CDATA[ " + this.css_string + " ]]></style>"

Where this.css_string is our stylesheet content. We then base64 encode the string and stick in the href of an <a> tag styled to look like a download button as seen here:

https://github.com/statgen/locuszoom/blob/v0.4.0/assets/js/a...

The end result is a download SVG link/button that is 100% client-side with our chosen stylesheet embedded.

Now, I have noticed that some styles defined in the stylesheet are valid in the browser but fail in InkScape and other SVG viewers. A prime example would be setting a stroke or fill to "transparent". InkScape doesn't interpret this properly and you can end up with solid black, just about the exact opposite of transparent. Keeping this in mind I stick to defining explicit "fill-opacity" and "stroke-opacity" values in the stylesheet for SVG elements and everything plays nice.

A working demo of this can be seen here: http://statgen.github.io/locuszoom/plot_builder.html