I was looking into SVG libraries and all the ones that are relatively mature seem to be very Windows unfriendly. Or rather MSVC unfriendly, I can get some to compile under cygwin. This isn't too surprising as SVG rendering depends on packages for both XML parsing and rendering. At this point I'm left with the decision to either port one of the existing SVG libraries to more cross platform code or to write my own SVG library. And given from what I know about SVG, writing my own sounds like it will take more time than I'm willing to devote to the project.

I think first I'll look for some open source appliations that use SVG and see if the SVG routines can be extracted to form an independent library. Alternately, it's possible that some of the non MSVC friendly libries can be used to compile a separate executable that the main application can use to dynamically create image files for use in game. This would be slightly less efficient, but probably a working solution.