In nautilus or eye-of-gnome or gwenview or gqview, I find that some svg files display (or preview) as expected, but some are either totally empty or in some cases seem to have just one black rectangle. Sometimes the gwenview display is ok but the thumbnail is blank.

This seems to be independent of distro, but I have seen it in Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 8.04. I am guessing it's something about the document size, background or some other property, or perhaps even some unexpected side effect of the xml, but I don't quite know what to look for.

In the past, I have seen a similar problem when the drawing content was outside the page boundary, but this is not the case here (AFAICT).
It is an inconvenience not to view svg files in a file browser or graphics browser, and I am wondering if I could be doing something different to avoid such diffiuculties -- or if there is some other explanation, such as a bug I could gripe about.

Sample svg(s) can be provided if requested.

Any suggestions?
..jim

jgsack wrote:Sample svg(s) can be provided if requested.

Yes, it would help to see an example. Otherwise it's impossible to say whether the problem is with the file, or with the viewer.

Any suggestions?

Perhaps try viewing problematic files with Batik Squiggle. It's rarely wrong, so it should give you some idea where the problem lies.